After Yeltsin, who?

During the short-lived coup in 1991, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak almost single-handedly prevented Soviet troops from occupying the city. But with Russia in chaos and Boris Yeltsin in a fight for his political future, Sobchak has joined centrists in criticizing Gaidar's shock therapy--perhaps positioning himself for a national role.

By now, the story is legendary among citizens and observers of the Russian republic. In front of a national television audience in 1990, Anatoly Sobchak, now the mayor of St. Petersburg, was excoriating then-Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov for his role in an $8 million defense profiteering scandal. "I do not understand you, Mikhail Sergeyevich," Ryzhkov complained to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. "Why do you always let Sobchak speak?"

The answer is obvious: As Gorbachev likely had long-since deduced, it is impossible to silence Sobchak, who was elected to the Soviet parliament in 1989 and soon after propelled himself into the global spotlight with his radical free market positions and fiery oratory skills. Sobchak cemented his reputation in the heat of the August 1991 coup when he faced down Leningrad's military commander and prevented Soviet troops from occupying the city. As mayor, he has deftly circumvented Communist Party officials, remaking St. Petersburg into a free economic zone with sovereignty over its banking and trade policies. Without a shred of self-consciousness, Sobchak rubs elbows with descendents of Peter the Great, the Romanov emperor who founded St. Petersburg on Baltic marshland in 1712 as Russia's imperial capital and "window on the West." Along with Boris Yeltsin, the mayor ranks as perhaps the only Russian official of true international standing.

Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak, 55, might be forgiven his crusade to shake up the status quo. His grandfather, who supported the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, was among the tens of millions imprisoned by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. After working as a lawyer in Stavropol, Russia, where a young Gorbachev was already making a name for himself, Sobchak returned to Leningrad to teach law, completing his doctoral thesis in 1973. He joined the Communist Party in 1988--still viewing it as a vehicle for change, he says--and was elected to the newly formed Congress of People's Deputies in April 1989. Two months later, he was named to the smaller, more powerful Supreme Soviet; Sobchak soon joined fellow parliamentarians Yeltsin and Andrei Sakharov in founding an ad hoc committee of the legislative body in opposition to the Communist Party. A day after Yeltsin's resignation from the Party in July 1990, Sobchak and former Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov followed suit.