NONFICTION - Nov. 24, 1991

FOR A NEW RUSSIA: The Mayor of St. Petersburg’s Own Story of the Struggle for Justice and Democracy by Anatoly Sobchak (Free Press: $22.95; 183 pp.). Free Press publicists trying to organize a recent media tour for Anatoly Sobchak grew accustomed to being upbraided with this question from irritated news producers: “Tell me, why on Earth should I be interested in interviewing the mayor of a middling city in Florida?!” Sobchak faced an uphill battle on his tour because few realized that Leningrad had taken back its old name of St. Petersburg, and because fewer still knew that its mayor was the most prominent leader after Boris Yeltsin to rally democratic forces in Russia during the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.

“For a New Russia” is not as carefully considered as recent books by Yeltsin, Eduard Shevardnadze and Gorbachev. His announcement that Russia’s old ruling classes have fallen seems premature, while his suggestion that existing Soviet law will address “earthly needs and grievances” seems overly optimistic. And yet Sobchak’s sensibility is appealing precisely because its spontaneity and hope better reflect the mood in Soviet streets than do the earlier, Establishment biographies.

Sobchak recalls, for instance, how one of his speeches was suddenly interrupted by a man shouting that leaders like “Sobchak want to castrate workers. . . . They have taken away their vodka. Now, they are going to take away their women!” He inspires another brawny man to tear a Sobchak poster off the wall. But when a third man argues that Sobchak “is for you sleeping with your woman as much as you like, but without forcing her to have abortions if you’re a drunkard and already have five mentally retarded kids!,” the first guy smooths out Sobchak’s photo and mutters: “Sorry pal, I didn’t know.”