candidates without running herself—but after her arrest for the Sakharov memorial march, she needed immunity from prosecution.
THIS WOULD BE the first elected city council in Leningrad history and, really, the first popularly elected governing body in the Soviet Union. Like all cities, Leningrad had been run by the local chapter of the Communist Party. New politicians, and new rules, proposed to relegate the Communist Party to the status of—well, a political party—and to rule the city through representative democracy. The transition was fast, painful, and sometimes hilarious. In the March election, pro-democracy candidates trounced the Communist Party, taking about two-thirds of the four hundred seats; 120 seats went to the People’s Front. Following the vote, an organizing committee of sixty deputies-elect convened to discuss the future workings of the city council. Leningrad’s Party boss, Boris Gidaspov, invited the committee to see him at the Smolny Institute, a historic college building that housed the regional Party headquarters. The deputies-elect politely suggested Gidaspov come see them himself, at the Mariinsky Palace, the grand building facing St. Isaac’s Square, where the old Communist-run city council had held its sessions—where the activists of the Battle of the Angleterre had gone to try to negotiate with city officials—and where the new democratic council would be housed.
Gidaspov, the old guard personified, had spent his entire professional life in Leningrad’s military-industrial complex, rising through the ranks fast and running vast institutes before being appointed to run the city Party organization in 1989. He walked into the conference room in the Mariinsky and headed straight for the head of the table. No sooner had he sat down than one of the deputies-elect said, “That is not your seat.” This was the changing of the guard.
A similarly symbolic scene took place in the Mariinsky’s main hall days later, when the new city council convened for its first session. The four hundred newly elected deputies took their seats in the grand amphitheater, looking down on a small walnut desk at which two men were already seated. Both were old-time Party bureaucrats, cast in the same mold as Gidaspov: heavyset, square-shouldered, gray-suited, with layered faces that never looked clean-shaven. One of them rose and began reading a standard speech, which opened with words of congratulations to the deputies on their election. One of those being congratulated approached the desk to ask, “Who told you you were running the meeting?” The bureaucrat trailed off, confused, and Alexei Kovalev, the preservationist known as “the hero of the Battle of the Angleterre,” appeared at the front of the hall and suggested the two visitors stop getting in the way of the session. The men got up, and Kovalev and Salye took the two seats at the desk in order to run the first meeting of the first democratically elected governing body in the Soviet Union.
The session began, as planned by the coordinating committee, with three of its members making procedural announcements. When they came to the front, the hall erupted with laughter, because all three sported the standard-issue intelligentsia look—turtleneck sweaters and beards. “It was fantastical,” recalled a sociologist who was present at the session. “It was a total change of atmosphere: the suits with their mugs were out, and the informals were in.”
Keeping with what one of them later termed “an acute sense of democracy” that brought them to the Mariinsky, the new deputies, in one of their first rulings, decided to remove all guards from the palace so that any citizen could gain access to any office or meeting hall. “The Mariinsky took on the look of a railroad station during the [Russian] Civil War,” one of the city council members wrote later. “Dozens of homeless men would stand at the entrance to the main assembly hall, grabbing deputies and trying to push typed papers into their hands. I remember a bearded man who kept trying to get the deputies to consider some brilliant invention of his. We had voted to remove the guards from the palace—and it was literally the next day that we were forced to calculate the cost of bronze details of the building’s interior that had gone missing.”
The guard was soon reestablished, but the people kept coming. “People had so longed to be heard,” another city council member recalled later. “When voters came to see us, we felt somewhat like priests administering confession. We would say, ‘I cannot provide you with a new apartment; that would extend beyond the scope of my authority,’ and they would respond, ‘Just hear me out.’ And we would listen, attentively and patiently. And people would leave satisfied.”
The realization that voters expected not only to be heard but also to be protected and fed would come a few months later.
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PRINCIPLES of radical democracy, the city council had no formal leader. This, however, proved impractical and even impolitic: as members of the new city council struggled to invent parliamentary procedure more or less from scratch, testing and reasserting rules of order in real time—and often on the air of the local television channel—Leningrad voters began to grow impatient. The city, the country, and life itself seemed to be falling apart all around them while the democrats practiced democracy without getting anything done.
Marina Salye, still the city’s most popular politician, decided not to run for chairman of the council. Twenty years later, she was hard-pressed to explain that decision: “I wish someone could tell me the answer,” she said. “Was it my stupidity, my inexperience, my shyness, or my naivete? I don’t know, but the fact is, I didn’t do it. And it was a mistake.”
With Salye recusing herself, city council activists decided to reach out to one of the city’s other two perestroika heroes: Anatoly Sobchak, the law professor who had earned a reputation in Moscow as the democrat from Leningrad. Sobchak was different from the bearded, sweater-wearing informals: in contrast to their contemplative, usually unassuming air, he was an ostentatiously sharp dresser—the Communists liked to criticize him for his “bourgeois” outfits, and his trademark checkered blazer still comes up in political reminiscences over twenty years later—and a forceful speaker. He seemed to love the sound of his own voice. As one of his former colleagues recalled, Sobchak “could derail a working meeting by delivering an impromptu forty-minute speech on the benefits of building an imaginary bridge” and mesmerize listeners while saying nothing of substance.
Though Sobchak belonged to Sakharov’s Interregional Group in the Supreme Soviet, he was actually far more conservative than the informals who were calling him back to Leningrad. A law professor who had taught at the police academy, he was in many ways part of the outgoing Soviet establishment. He had recently joined the Communist Party, clearly believing that, with all of Gorbachev’s reforms, the Party would continue to run the country. And in a divided city whose new democratic politicians were increasingly using its historic designation, St. Petersburg, he opposed changing the name of the city, arguing that the name Leningrad better reflected its military valor.
Sobchak was also much more of a politician than any of the informals knew how to be. He had far-reaching ambition: it would not be long before he started telling everyone he would be the next president of Russia. Meanwhile, at the city level, he apparently wanted to preside over the entire city council without being beholden to the democrats who had called him to the throne. To that end, he did some advance—and highly secretive—lobbying among the minority Communist Party faction of the council, and the Communists surprised everyone by voting in favor of Sobchak. A few minutes later Sobchak, in turn, upset expectations by not nominating Salye or one of the other prominent democrats to be his deputy. Instead, he named Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, a Communist Party member and a rear admiral. The democrats, taken aback, nonetheless honored their agreement with Sobchak and voted to confirm Shcherbakov as his deputy.
Sobchak then addressed the city council. He spelled out how he saw his mission: he was there to be the boss, not the leader. He viewed the city council as being bogged down in “democratic procedure for the sake of democratic procedure,” as he put it, and he wanted to get on with the business of actually running the city. His voice growing more confident with every passing minute, Sobchak informed the city council that things were about to change.
“We realized our mistake as soon as we had voted for him,” recalled one of the city council members later. Sobchak was intent on destroying what a majority of city council members saw as the greatest accomplishment of the two months that had passed since their own election: the invention of a non-Soviet way of doing business. The informals went home shocked and dejected.
Sobchak went to the airport to fly to a legal conference in the United States.
“HIS ST. PETERSBURG PERIOD WAS MURKIEST,” Gevorkyan said of the campaign biography she and her colleagues wrote. “I never did figure out how he hooked up with Sobchak.”
Back in Leningrad, Putin’s KGB colleagues seemed to be seeking ways not to fight the new political reality but
