Tale of Fallen Mayor Evokes Russian Classics

The fall of Anatoly A. Sobchak, a onetime democratic hero, has been as darkly fantastic as any of the classical Russian literature written in this imperial capital that he ran for five post-Soviet years.

In the glory days of August 1991, Sobchak and President Boris N. Yeltsin together rallied the Russian masses to stop a hard-line Soviet coup. But Sobchak, briefly considered a potential future president of Russia, gradually grew so unpopular here that he lost his mayor’s job last summer.

Then things got worse.

Sobchak is now in a hospital bed, wearing a white gown and on an intravenous drip. He faces both a trial over allegations of large-scale corruption while in office and the surgeon’s knife after suffering a heart attack during questioning in the city prosecutor’s office.

His interrogation followed the launch in September of the latest of many Russian campaigns against top-level corruption. None of them have targeted politicians in favor in the Kremlin.

Sobchak, a tall, stooping former law professor, says he is being made a scapegoat.

“I find it amusing to be accused of being the mirror of Russian corruption,” he said--an allusion to Soviet state founder V. I. Lenin’s name for rebellious writer Leo Tolstoy, “mirror of the Russian Revolution,” which has since become a Russian press cliche.

“There are other reasons for this,” he said. “The main one is to distract attention from Moscow, the real center of corruption.”

The controversy over Sobchak shows how far Russian politics, now run by tough, pragmatic economists, has moved from the intellectual democracy of the early 1990s that the former boss of St. Petersburg symbolizes. It also makes clear how Russians became disillusioned with that early democracy, seeing the movement’s leaders as both inefficient and greedy, and why many are watching the downfall of Sobchak with grim satisfaction.

The list of accusations against him is long and detailed.

Sobchak freely admits that he let pop stars, political cronies and city hall chauffeurs buy apartments from city hall at cut-rate prices. He says he had the right to be generous “not only to cultural figures and people who served their country and marked themselves with achievement, but lonely mothers, poorer people [or] a woman with triplets.”

Such gifts cost St. Petersburg $2 million last year, says Alexander Shishlov, a parliamentary deputy and one of Sobchak’s leading critics.

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But what brought Sobchak before the prosecutor was a scandal closer to home. He is also accused of abusing his mayoral powers to attach an extra apartment to his own flat on a pretty St. Petersburg canal side street, creating a 3,275-square-foot family living space registered in his wife’s name; that is a space beyond the wildest dreams of most people here, who live in tiny apartments up winding staircases. The money used to buy new housing for his former neighbors came from a real-estate company seeking concessions from the city, according to the daily Izvestia. The same firm gave his niece another apartment.

Another property in Sobchak’s wife’s name is allegedly a country mansion, complete with pointy fairy-tale tower, in nearby Repino.

St. Petersburg is buzzing with still more rumors about possible Sobchak properties in Paris, Spain, Finland and the northern Russian Republic of Karelia, not to mention apartments in Moscow and bulging bank accounts in London.

But Lyudmila Narusova, Sobchak’s wife and a parliamentary deputy, says the family property abroad consists of no more than 1 square foot of the American city of St. Petersburg, Fla., a symbolic gift from its mayor.

“This story has given rise to a mass of media material proving either that Anatoly Alexandrovich [Sobchak] is a saint, suffering for his anti-Communist convictions, or roundly accusing him of being a ‘criminal element,’ ” the weekly Argumenty i Fakty commented wryly.

Politicians of Sobchak’s own liberal democratic ilk say he is being victimized. Gavriil K. Popov, who was the mayor of Moscow in 1991, told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper that the authorities are behaving in a “very peculiar” way.

“Once again, we are hearing sound effects coming from the prosecutor’s office,” Popov said darkly--a suggestion that conservative officials are using the anti-corruption campaign to pursue their own agenda of damaging Russia’s most famous democrats.

But, apart from veteran democratic politicians, hardly anyone is sympathetic to the conspiracy theory explanation.

Lawmaker Alexei Alexandrov, a lawyer, poured cold water on it, saying: “I don’t think anyone’s behind the Sobchak affair. He’s a loner, not a team player. That’s his tragedy. It’s his egotism and ambition that have made him a host of enemies.”

Whatever the verdict--if Sobchak’s health improves enough so he can face trial--democrat has already become a dirty word in St. Petersburg these days. The people of this improbably beautiful city of decaying Italianate palaces, glamorous canals, tubercular fogs and poisoned water are fed up with Sobchak for neglecting their home.

St. Petersburg stayed poor and uncomfortable after the Soviet collapse--while the rival city of Moscow, which people here once despised, grew rich under capitalism. Voters are pleased that, since June, they at last have a more efficient politician running their city.

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Under Mayor Vladimir Yakovlev, traffic has been disrupted by a frenzy of road work. Tramlines have been ripped up and potholed streets resurfaced. For the first time in years, garbage is being collected regularly.

“Of course I voted for Sobchak. He represented everything I believed in, when democracy was the slogan on everyone’s lips,” said academic Konstantin Bogdanov, 34. “But he did nothing for the city. . . . I’m beginning to realize you need someone efficient in charge--actions, not just words.”

If anything does make people in St. Petersburg feel a twinge of sympathy for Sobchak, it is the extraordinary circumstances in which he fell ill Oct. 3, an episode in the tradition of the city’s 19th century writers Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol.

Russia’s classical literature is a collection of tales that stress the frailty of ordinary humans trapped in a beautiful but oppressive imperial structure. Its heroes are little men--youths pursued through freak floods by nightmarish bronze czars on horseback; or downtrodden bureaucrats dying while their empty overcoats carry on, writing meaningless chits at their desks. Compassion for these fictitious ancestors makes city people here look kindly on any underdog being crushed by authority.

In Feodor Dostoevsky’s philosophical murder story, “Crime and Punishment,” Raskolnikov, a student and killer, is unmasked by the enigmatic policeman Porfiry Petrovich after an agonizing tussle of wills; the reader, however, is still left sympathetic to Raskolnikov and glad of his ultimate redemption.

In Sobchak’s case, an ambulance was called to the prosecutor’s office to take him to the hospital only after his wife rushed in to save her husband from what she called “Communists and Gestapo.” Narusova blamed her husband’s heart problem on “about 10” riot police, who she said had muscled her husband to the prosecutor’s office. But officials there said they were forced to bring Sobchak in because he had ignored 12 earlier invitations to appear voluntarily.

Some media reports initially suggested that Sobchak was faking illness. “Eyewitnesses say he docilely did as he was told by his wife, who stormed into the investigator’s office, shouting abuse, and then cried that Sobchak had had a heart attack,” sniffed the conservative newspaper Pravda-5. “Sobchak promptly lowered himself onto a desk and said that he was ill.”

But, nearly a month later, he is still in the hospital.

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There is an even more literary feel about the man running the commission investigating the Sobchaks’ property privatizations. Yuri Shutov is far from neutral about his former boss, who, he says, fired him from city hall and jailed him on trumped-up charges ranging from setting fire to a hotel to attempting the assassination of the president of Azerbaijan.

Shutov has written a series of malicious books about Sobchak, full of unflattering photos of his hate object. One title, “The Heart of Sobchak,” is another literary allusion, this time to a novella by 1930s author Mikhail Bulgakov, “Heart of a Dog.”

“True, I wouldn’t vote for Sobchak now,” said Marina Zimina, 24. “But I do feel sorry for him. Whatever he did, or didn’t do, it seems as though the whole establishment has got together to pick on him.”