The president and prime minister visit St Petersburg.
On February 20, President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took an active part in the memorial events devoted to the 10th anniversary of the death of Anatoly Sobchak, the first mayor of St Petersburg. Both Medvedev and Putin called Sobchak a true free thinker and admitted that his seat on the political Olympus has since remained vacant.
Medvedev listened to Sobchak's lectures and was his representative at the elections of People's Deputies in 1989. Having headed the Leningrad City Council, Sobchak invited Medvedev to work for him. He invited Putin, too, a month later, and soon the latter became his right-hand man in running the city. When Sobchak lost the gubernatorial elections in 1996, Deputy Mayor Vladimir Putin headed his election headquarters. In the beginning of 2000, Medvedev headed Putin's headquarters at the presidential elections, while Sobchak became Putin's election representative. He died several days after, on the night of February 19-20, 2000.
On February 19, Putin and Medvedev shared their impressions of Sobchak in the documentary "Ten Years after Anatoly Sobchak," which was broadcast on the Rossiya network. Medvedev was interviewed by Sobchak's daughter, Ksenia, and Putin by his widow, Senator Lyudmila Narusova (their dialogue was published on the government's official site). Putin emphasised, for instance, that Sobchak had demonstrated that "it is possible to have democratic views and at the same time be an advocate of a strong state and a patriot of one's country." When asked whether he can imagine Sobchak in today's parliament, Putin said evasively that he does not see such people on the political scene today.
On February 20, Medvedev and Putin went to St Petersburg. Accompanied by Sobchak's daughter and widow, they separately visited the Nikolskoye Cemetery in the Alexandro-Nevskaya Lavra and brought roses to Sobchak's grave.
Medvedev then visited his Alma Mater, the law faculty of St Petersburg State University, where he attended an exhibition devoted to Sobchak and awarded top students with scholarships in the former mayor's name. Meanwhile, at the Museum for Democracy, also named after Anatoly Sobchak, Vladimir Putin spoke to the memory of his former mentor.
The president and the prime minister both admitted that Sobchak's seat on the political Olympus has since remained vacant. Medvedev recalled that Sobchak was "the first to use legal arguments in politics." He said that when he was in charge of Putin's headquarters during his presidential election campaign, Sobchak came to him and, looking him straight in the eye, asked him to persuade someone from among those who had left for Moscow to come back and run St Petersburg.
Medvedev and Putin fulfilled the request of their mentor in a rather paradoxical way. "Now the city is run by Valentina Matviyenko, who worked in our government at that time," Medvedev explained. In line with the traditions of Soviet literature for children, the president reminded budding lawyers that "Sobchak was always a good student, and those who study well always achieve success in life." When a Kommersant correspondent asked the current students how they will try to achieve success, one of them mentioned "business," the second the legal profession, and the third admitted that he would like to work in a "more honest field than politics." At the end of his speech, Medvedev said that he "does not want to leave the stage" where he once read lectures like Sobchak. "Maybe this is what I'll do one day," he concluded. However, leaving the hall, the students were mostly sharing the impression produced by Ksenia Sobchak.
In the meantime Putin gave a speech on democracy in the Museum for Democracy. Having called Sobchak a democratic thinker to the core, he recalled how the first mayor promised "not to remain in Smolny for a single day after the completion of his second term." "We must gradually introduce these principles of democracy into the nation's mentality," Putin said and immediately switched to the current state of affairs.
"Depending on its maturity, the civil society of every country chooses a balance between stability and elements of development, which allows it to move forward without shaking the public life or threatening citizens with potential cataclysms," Putin said. He said that he believes Russia has established such a balance and went on: "We must be able to react to these changes in order to be competitive. But these changes should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary."
When speaking about the tribute the two leaders paid to the memory of her late husband, Narusova said that they "understood the need to turn the weight of historical memory attached to a watershed moment in the country's life back to its beginnings, from which all changes emerged." "The fact that both leaders came to St Petersburg on this day and spoke about the need for change, along with their efforts to curb the Ministry of the Interior and the president's statements about the importance of a multi-party parliament, shows that Sobchak was right in many cases and makes me hope that our leaders' words were not simply a tribute to his memory," she said.
On the eve of the anniversary of her husband's death, Narusova gave an interview to the Rosbalt news agency in which she made much more critical statements about the current government. Having acknowledged that "Putin had to act much tougher than Sobchak," Narusova noted that "the strong vertical power he built was essential." However, "absolutely unnecessary restrictions on politics and the media were pushed through under the pretext of necessary reforms," she said. "We do not have a law-based state, we have military-police feudalism," she concluded. "Political parties exist as closed joint stock companies. Their place at the elections depends on the share in the charter capital," Narusova said. She noted that she hears Sobchak's voice in Medvedev's statements on a state based on the rule of law, but that many opportunities for building it were lost. "In today's political reality, we can only put our hope in the new generation, those who have grown up without trembling with fear before the authorities. The young people may be able to implement Sobchak's ideas. Maybe his daughter will. Ksenia has the same reckless courage that her father had," Narusova concluded.
PhD in History Grigory Golosov, the director of the Interregional Electoral Support Network, expressed this opinion: "The events in Sobchak's memory have nothing to do with a turn to the democratisation of society. They are simply a harmless excuse for an imitative, rather than active, political life and promoting public discussion."
Anna Pushkarskaya