Anatoly Sobchak

Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak (Анатолий Александрович Собчак; 10 August 1937 – 19 February 2000) was a Russian politician, a co-author of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the first democratically elected mayor of Saint Petersburg, and a mentor and teacher of future presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.

Anatoly Sobchak was born in Chita, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, on 10 August 1937.

His father, Aleksander Antonovich, was a railroad engineer of Polish and Czech origin, and his mother, Nadezhda Andreyevna Litvinova, was an accountant of Russian and Ukrainian origin.

Anatoly was one of four brothers.

In 1939, the family moved to Uzbekistan, where Anatoly lived until 1953 before entering Stavropol Law College.

In 1954, he transferred to Leningrad State University.

In 1958, he married Nonna Gandzyuk, a student of Hertzen Teacher's College.

After graduating from Leningrad State University, he worked for three years as a lawyer in Stavropol, then returned to Leningrad State University for graduate studies (1962–1965).

They had a daughter called Maria Sobchak, born in 1965, who is currently a St. Petersburg lawyer, while her son Gleb Sobchak, born in 1983, graduated from the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg State University.

After obtaining his Ph.D., he taught law at the Leningrad Police School and the Leningrad Institute for Cellulose and Paper Industries' Technology (1965–1973), and between 1973 and 1990 he taught at Leningrad State University.

In 1980, he married Lyudmila Narusova, at that time a history student at the Leningrad Academy of Soviet Culture and later a prominent MP.

They had a daughter, Ksenia Sobchak.

After obtaining his D.Sc. in 1982, he was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Common Law in Socialist Economics.

He was very popular among law students, especially for his mildly anti-government comments.

During his work at Leningrad State University, he established close relations with its then administrator of international affairs, Vladimir Putin, which he maintained for the rest of his life.

In 1989, after election laws changed during Perestroika, he was elected as an independent candidate to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union.

He was one of only a few deputies who had a legal background, so he contributed enormously to most of the laws created from 1989 to 1991.

He became one of the founders and a co-chairman of the Inter-Regional Deputies Group along with Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin.

He also was a chairman of the Parliamentary Commission on the Investigation of the events of 9 April 1989 in Tbilisi.

The Commission condemned the military, which was blamed for many deaths when dispersing demonstrators.

The Commission's report made it more difficult to use military force against civil demonstrations in the Soviet Union and Russia.

He was a member of the President's Consultative Council during Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure and contributed to legislation that originated from the presidential administration.

In April 1990, Sobchak was elected a deputy of the Leningrad City Council, and in May he became the chairman of the Council.

From the beginning, his leadership was marked by a strongly authoritarian bent.

The Council decided to change the structure of the city governance so as to have a Mayor elected by direct elections.

After the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, Sobchak was not a member of the central Parliament but was a member of Yeltsin's Presidential Council and the chairman of the Constitutional Assembly that prepared the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 1993.

The constitution is often informally called Sobchak's constitution, although its real authors have been somewhat less known.

The first of such elections in June 1991 were combined with the referendum on the city name.

Sobchak won the elections, and the city voted to return to its historical name of Saint Petersburg.

The name change was established in one of the last sessions of the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union, held on 12 September 1991.

The change needed an amendment of the Constitution of the Soviet Union and its passage required much effort by Sobchak.

During his tenure, a Kissinger-Sobchak commission was formed in order to attract western investment into St. Petersburg.

According to Putin who had met with Kissinger a couple of times, when Kissinger stated that the Soviet Union had pulled out of Eastern Europe too quickly under Gorbachev and that Kissinger was being blamed but Kissinger had thought it was impossible, Putin had agreed with Kissinger because so many problems would have been avoided if the pullout had not been so hasty.

Sobchak was Mayor of Saint Petersburg from 1991 to 1996.

During his tenure, the city became a place of glamorous cultural and sporting events.

Most of the everyday control of the city structure was handled by two Mayor's deputies – Vladimir Yakovlev and Vladimir Putin; critics alleged deterioration of city infrastructure, growing corruption, and crime during this time.

After falling out with Sobchak, Yury Shutov wrote the book Heart of a Dog (Собчачье сердце) as a criticism of Sobchak in 1991.

In the 1996 mayoral election, Sobchak was opposed by his former first deputy Vladimir Yakovlev and lost by a margin of 1.2%.

The major pitch of Yakovlev's campaign was that Sobchak's patronage of the arts (with city money) and involvement in federal politics prevented him from solving the real problems of the city.

In 1997, a criminal investigation started against Sobchak.