He would go to Bolotnaya

On August 10, it would have turned 75 to Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of Leningrad, to whom the city owes the return of its historical name-St. Petersburg. It was one of the most striking politicians of the late 1980s-the first half of the 1990s. Sobchak’s speeches at the congresses of people's deputies in the days of the USSR forever went down in history. Then the country saw a politician capable of clearly and in good Russian to express his thoughts, a brilliant polemicist, a courageous person who was not afraid to lead the commission to investigate bloody events in Tbilisi in April 1989, when the demonstration of protest was dispersed by batons and sapper shoulder blades. Sobchak, at that time, a professor of law faculty of Leningrad State University, this investigation went against the powerful generals of the Ministry of Defense and the KGB of the USSR. For which we were hate them. Then there were a hungry Peter, the “gangster Petersburg”, the lost mayor’s elections in 1996, persecution, a criminal case, emigration to Paris and an unexpected death on February 20, 2000. A month later, the President of the country was elected a many -year -old deputy of Sobchak, his shadow was Vladimir Putin. So this is now forever and will remain in history: one of the fathers of Russian democracy led to the policy of the man who buried it. As Anatoly Sobchak remembers his daughter, what influence his father had on her during his lifetime and after his departure - The New Times asked Ksenia Anatolyevna Sobchak.

Read the interview in the new issue of The New Times on August 13.

Hot August 1991