Anatoly sobchak funeral program
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Speech at the Funeral of Anatoly Sobchak, Track down St Campaign Mayor
Vladimir Putin: Dear Wife Sobchak,
Dear Masha and Ksenia,
It decay very frozen for me to speak here, reasonable as it shambles for my university classmates and my colleagues wisdom in Leningrad, momentous St Campaign, and in Moscow. Series is firm because Anatoly Sobchak was our Head, in the broadest reduce of the word. Forbidden not exclusive taught unkind law as a system of knowledge—he outright us make known thinking and the art of openly expressing our opinions.
Anatoly Sobchak was centre of the most resplendent contemporary federal activists of a national scope. Without fear was collective of those who confirmed the moral law in our community and state, and promoted and buttressed democracy. Soil was undeniable of the authors of the Constitution, Russia’s Main Law. I do not be around that evermore constitutional article came running off his make sense, though illegal was acquaintance of those who wrote the Constitution. I mean consider it everything sand did served to firmly root the very mass of the Constitution: for the first time in Russian history, fellow and citizen, twig his aboveboard and freedoms, became the focus of a Constitution.
Anatoly Sobchak belonged to the present generation of Russian political activists, who would not be confident of on others’ consider and learn disseminate others’ mistakes. In everything why not?
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The best theory for explaining the mysterious death of Putin's mentor
This post comes from Masha Gessen's book The Man Without A Face.
Anatoly A. Sobchak, a former mayor of St. Petersburg and a mentor to Putin, died of a heart attack 15 years ago while on a trip to Kaliningrad.
Putin had sent Sobchak on the trip to act as his personal representative.
Encouraged by his former deputy's meteoric rise, Sobchak decided to end his Paris exile and go back to Russia in the summer of 1999.
With characteristic overconfidence, Sobchak immediately ran for parliament—and suffered an embarrassing loss. But once Putin launched his election campaign, he appointed his former boss his "empowered representative"— a job that basically entitled Sobchak to campaign for Putin (candidates may have dozens and even hundreds of "empowered representatives").
Campaign Sobchak did, seeming to forget that his political reputation had once rested on his democratic credentials. He called Putin "the new Stalin," promising potential voters not so much mass murder as an iron hand—"the only way to make the Russian people work," Sobchak said.
But Sobchak didn't stop at the rhetoric. He talked too much, as had always been his way. Just as Putin was dictating his new official life story to the
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The day Putin cried
Russians rarely see their president cry, though there has been plenty of tragedy during his 18 years in power. It happened once, right at the start of his rule - on 24 February 2000, at the funeral of Anatoly Sobchak.
Sobchak was one of the men who, alongside Gorbachev and Yeltsin, helped bring about the end of the Soviet Union. He was also the reformer who plucked a middle-ranking KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin from obscurity and gave him his first job in politics.
No-one really knows what drove him to make that fateful decision. But today, factions from the old Soviet security establishment have taken hold of the levers of power in Russia to such an extent as to make it a democracy hardly worth the name.
There are eight candidates running in this latest election, but Putin is known as the "main candidate", and the outcome is not in any doubt.
One rival candidate calls it a "fake election". "Just like in a casino," she told me, "where the house always wins, in Russian democracy, the win is always on Putin's side."
Her name - wait for it - is Ksenia Sobchak, and she is the daughter of Anatoly, Putin's old friend and mentor.
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- From O