Leningrad’s Mayor Foresaw Soviet Upheaval

Anatoly A. Sobchak was ahead of his time in the mid-1970s when he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the constitutional and legal changes required for the Soviet Union to move to a free-market economy.

The dissertation was rejected as heretical by Leningrad State University, and Sobchak had to wait nine years until the political climate changed before he was awarded the coveted doctorate.

Now, Sobchak is the mayor of Leningrad, soon to be renamed St. Petersburg, and he is putting many of those ideas--and others still more radical--into practice.

In the process, he is becoming one of the most influential people reshaping the Soviet Union as it abandons socialism.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, seeking to assess the Soviet Union’s future amid political upheaval unprecedented since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, will travel to Leningrad today for dinner with Sobchak, a man already seen by many here as a potential president.

Sobchak, 54, was among the scores of new politicians to emerge from the 1989 parliamentary elections, the country’s first free, competitive elections in nearly 70 years. Born in Chita, in eastern Siberia, he came from a poor family but did well enough at school to win admission to Leningrad State University, one of the country’s best.

He made his mark at the earliest sessions of the Congress of People’s Deputies, as the Parliament was known, taking on conservatives in the Communist Party leadership, the country’s prime minister, the military and the KGB security agency. His eloquence, good looks and cogency brought him a national following as the Congress was televised.

He was an advocate of political pluralism, helping break the Communists’ constitutional monopoly on power. He argued for the rule of law in a country founded on the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” And he began to push for the transition to a market economy and free enterprise.

But Sobchak has also been a critic of the country’s “democrats,” as liberals are called here, upbraiding them for their lack of vision and poor organization. He criticized a national coal miners’ strike as unjustified and only likely to harm the country. He still worries about the “political illiteracy” of a country poorly prepared for democracy.

His relationship with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been warm at times, strained at others. His relationship with Boris N. Yeltsin, the Russian Federation president, is equally complex; they agree on goals but often differ on how to achieve them.

“Sobchak came down to Moscow with a vision,” Yuri A. Ryzhov, another liberal deputy, recalled. “To many, it seemed like a fantasy--a market economy, the Communists just another party, the Soviet Union as a confederation, even the end of what we called ‘Soviet power.’ This is what he foresaw. This is what is happening today.”

Sobchak, who headed a law department at Leningrad State University, got into politics because, in the words of an American civil rights leader, he had a dream. Reading speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., Sobchak saw that a period of tremendous change was coming in the Soviet Union, as it had in the United States, and decided to work for his dream.

After his election to the new Parliament two years ago, he was elected to the Leningrad City Council in 1990 and as mayor three months ago. He had joined the Communist Party only in 1988, when he saw it as a vehicle for reform under Gorbachev’s leadership. He quit two years later--with Yeltsin and other liberals--when he concluded that it would never promote fundamental changes.

During the conservative coup d’etat last month, Sobchak immediately brought tens of thousands of supporters into the streets. He had his deputy, an admiral, appointed as the city’s “commandant,” and he threatened the regional military commander with a “Nuremberg prosecution” and the death penalty if any troops were deployed.

“I know that for one or two more years, the life of the country will be at a turning point,” he wrote recently in his autobiography, “and so I have carry it out to the end, to the moment when this system is buried.”