Vladimir Putin has not yet announced his candidacy for Russia’s presidential election in 2018, but the race does have at least one early entrant: Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of Putin’s first boss and the so-called “Russian Paris Hilton”, is officially running for president.
The Kremlin, of course, has given Sobchak’s candidacy the seal of approval. Russian elections are a farce, and everyone who participates in the process is only contributing to the charade. The story of Ksenia Sobchak’s candidacy is not about real electoral choices, which do not actually exist in today’s Russa. But I would like to summarize some facts about Sobchak that paved the way for her Potemkin presidential run. It’s a story that helps demonstrate how corrupt and tightly-controlled Russia’s system really is.
Ksenia Sobchak has never been far from Russia’s power circles. The daughter of former Saint Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who effectively launched Vladimir Putin’s political career by hiring and mentoring him in the 1990s, the younger Sobchak has been hounded by persistent rumors that she is Putin’s god-daughter, though she strenuously denies it. Her mother, meanwhile, has nurtured a national political career of her own: as a Senator since 2002, and before that as a member of the State Duma.
The younger Sobchak first made headlines of her own in 2002. The 21-year-old was at the time dating Chechen businessman Umar Dzhabrailov when she was robbed in her apartment in a highly publicized incident. Sobchak later claimed $600,000 worth of jewelry was stolen in the incident. It was only the first of many headline-grabbing incidents that would follow Sobchak’s life in the public eye. (Dzhabrailov himself is no stranger to the spotlight either: he turned up in the news for firing a pistol in his room at Moscow’s Four Seasons luxury hotel. No one was hurt, but the police later found white powder in the room. Dzhabrailov, a businessman and a former Russian Senator, said it was baking soda.)
Later in the 2000s, Sobchak became a TV star when she started hosting a lowbrow reality show called Dom (The House). The nation came to know her as a glamorous blonde—a “Russian Paris Hilton”—as Sobchak successfully cashed in on her image as a spoiled rich girl.
But when fashion trends in Moscow shifted in a more intellectual and hipster direction, Sobchak accordingly transformed herself yet again. In 2011, riding the wave of mass anti-Putin protests in Moscow, she joined the opposition movement and became one of its public faces—without ever vocally opposing Vladimir Putin, curiously enough.
In December of 2011, at the height of the Moscow protests triggered by rigged Parliamentary elections, Sobchak took the stage and made a speech. She called for “influencing the government, rather than changing it.” Her speech was roundly booed, since protesters were fed up with Putin and his recently announced return. Nevertheless, Sobchak kept attending the protests, giving speeches and interviews. She always said some version of the same thing: “I didn’t go to a rally for Putin’s resignation, I personally went to the rally for fair elections. I believe there is a big difference between these two concepts… I also made clear that among today’s opposition leaders I don’t see a person I’d like to follow. I happen to stand for an evolutionary way of development.” In long interviews for major media outlets, Sobchak kept returning to this theme, saying she didn’t see a person who could credibly replace Putin.
Sobchak’s transformation was complete when she, along with Alexey Navalny and the late Boris Nemtsov, got elected to the Opposition Coordination Council, an organizational body of the opposition forces. Soon after the elections to the OCC, a split emerged. One part of the OCC demanded Putin’s resignation, while the other one—led by Sobchak—called for eliminating anti-Putin messaging and demanded reforms from the government. The OCC proved dysfunctional and a year later, in October 2013, it was dissolved.
In the meantime, Sobchak’s profile in the opposition got a boost. She started hosting a TV show on TV Dozhd, an independent and privately-owned TV Channel popular with the opposition. But Sobchak’s career in state-approved spheres was never hurt. She kept hosting prestigious awards and corporate events which brought her a lot of money. She was never banned from such events because of her opposition views, while others were punished for their political stance and stripped of their affiliations. Nor did Sobchak dare to question the Kremlin’s most important narratives: she has never said that the annexation of Crimea was illegal and that the peninsula must be given back to Ukraine, for example.
Finally, after Boris Nemtsov was murdered in front of the Kremlin, Sobchak disseminated a story that Vladimir Putin was furious about the murder. She was not the only one to do this, but she seemed intent on establishing it as a matter of public record, not merely as one source’s hearsay. Ksenia Sobchak did her best to convince society that it was Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov who made a decision to kill Nemtsov, and that Putin had nothing to do with it. This phrase, from her blog, was read by a half-million people: “According to credible sources, Kadyrov must surely know how furious and shocked Putin was by Nemtsov’s murder.” This declaration of Putin’s alleged anger has been repeated by Sobchak as a declaration of fact. She also said that Putin would surely punish Kadyrov—at some later date, just not now. Much as she did at the protests, Sobchak here performed a very important mission for the Kremlin. (I have been told that Sobchak played a role in luring Nemtsov back to Russia from Israel in the fall of 2014, mere months before he was killed.)
In September, the Kremlin leaked to the press that it was looking for a woman for the 2018 elections, and that it might be Sobchak. At the time, she denounced the rumors, but this week, she finally announced she was in fact running. Putin’s Spokesman Dmitry Peskov immediately supported her decision, saying that she “fully fulfills the constitutional requirements.” This was an implicit reference on Peskov’s part to Alexey Navalny, whose conviction on embezzlement charges precludes him from running.
Ksenia Sobchak’s run for president suggests she is going to be the next Mikhail Prokhorov, a Russian tycoon who ran as a spoiler in 2012. She will play the role of an opposition candidate, even though she has never demonstrated an ounce of real opposition to the Putin regime. Her real role is to play a part in the Kremlin’s grand charade, and to muddy the waters at crucial moments—just like when civil society posed a real threat to the Kremlin’s legitimacy in 2011-2012, or when Putin was embarrassed by Boris Nemtsov’s murder in 2015.
At the very least, Sobchak’s experience in the entertainment world should serve her well in her latest endeavor. In today’s Russia, where Putin and the FSB are really pulling the strings, democracy itself has become a spy reality show, where no one can be trusted.
