Word: sobchak
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Yuri Kobaladze, a onetime KGB general turned businessman, says Putin's life changed when he bumped into former Leningrad law lecturer Anatoli Sobchak in a corridor early in 1990. Sobchak asked what he was doing. "I'm doing nothing," Putin replied. "My career's not a success because they told me to come back here. I have nothing to do here." "Join me," said Sobchak. Sobchak was dazzling the city with his promises of democracy and reform. Putin was ready to make a "real break," says a close Putin aide. "People had the feeling Sobchak was someone they could...
...Putin was sent back to Leningrad, still in the employ of the KGB, to monitor that city's blossoming perestroika movement. Among his contacts was one of the city's most progressive politicians, and a former law professor of his, Anatoly Sobchak. When Sobchak became mayor, Putin joined him and eventually handled foreign investment, among other responsibilities. Though he hunkered out of public sight--he was known as "a gray cardinal"--Putin began to accumulate power and a quiet reputation among reformers. In 1996, Sobchak lost a re-election campaign, and Putin headed to Moscow, where he quickly rose...
...question now is whether Yeltsin has the physical and mental stamina to keep that high-risk approach going. "Yeltsin is always capable of something unexpected," says Anatoli Sobchak, the former mayor of St. Petersburg. "He seems to have lost all his strength and then he recuperates." But each recuperation appears to exact a heavier toll, and bouts of hyperactivity are followed by longer and longer periods of inaction and illness. That is no long-term prescription for keeping control of a country as unruly as Russia today...
...Sobchak shared one of his ideas for continuingthe modernization of Russia while keepingunemployment low, borrowed from American PresidentFranklin Delano Roosevelt '04, who was a Crimsoneditor...
...Sobchak said the current mindset of the Russianpeople will be the greatest political obstacle in1996...