Word: sobchak
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...Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, a hero of the resistance to August's aborted hard-line coup, reformers in the city are trying to pull St. Petersburg out of Moscow's shadow and transform it into a gateway to the West. Some even suggest returning the political capital to St. Petersburg, though Sobchak says his task is "to revive St. Petersburg as the financial, cultural and scientific capital of Russia." For a precedent, Sobchak turns to the city's founder, Peter the Great, the Czar who set out to westernize the backward Russian Empire. "For 10 years Peter the Great tried...
...Petersburg's architectural charm and rich history will do little to diminish the formidable obstacles confronting Sobchak as he tries to reform the city's economy. His advisers are working on plans to create a "free economic zone" around the city by Jan. 1, in the hope that lower taxes and fewer customs barriers will encourage foreign banks and companies to invest. So far, Moscow is going along with the idea. But even Anatoly Chubais, Sobchak's chief economic adviser, admits that the free economic zone is "a risky policy" prone to failure if Russia's economy as a whole...
...military-industrial complex, Chubais argues that the abundance of enterprises producing high-tech equipment such as satellites and communications systems gives the city an edge in attracting foreign capital. But Western firms may be reluctant to make investments in a republic as unstable as Russia. If so, Sobchak's St. Petersburg could be rocked by massive unemployment as Moscow trims orders for military hardware...
...persuasive speaker who counts John F. Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle among his role models, Sobchak, 53, is one of the most influential politicians in Russia, behind only Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Yet conservative and liberal opponents alike accuse him of resorting to authoritarianism in running the affairs of St. Petersburg. "God never gave Anatoly Sobchak the talent to work with other people," wrote one critic. Sobchak, a former law professor, dismisses the accusations as the grumblings of "incompetents" on the unwieldy, 382-member city council. Thanks to his national status, Sobchak says...
...bigger ones, into an alliance that, combined with massive and timely Western aid, would stop the economic disintegration. And Russians have what German democrats in the Weimar period woefully lacked: forceful, popular leaders like Yeltsin -- who on the whole has been more democrat than autocrat -- St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoli Sobchak and Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov. Authoritarians as yet have no leader with any comparable clout. But a lawyer named Vladimir Zhirinovsky did run third in last June's Russian presidential election despite -- or because of -- his wild ideas (he now speaks of solving food shortages by invading the former East...