FROM PARTY GIRL TO PUTIN'S THREAT
It-girl Ksenia Sobchak was once famous for being “Russia’s Paris Hilton.” Now she is winning political gravitas as the newsest voice of opposition against Russian president Vladimir Putin.
By Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, Pictures by Victor Demarchelier
A slender blonde in a trench coat darts into Manhattan's Cipriani Downtown and heads straight to the back. No one glances twice at her—not the table of off-duty models, not the 21 Jump Street star having a late lunch, and not the maître d', who surveys the establishment like Count Vronsky at his country estate. If this were her native Russia, however, it would have been inconceivable that the entire restaurant hadn't paused the moment she walked through the door. For this is Ksenia Sobchak, who is known alternately as the scantily clad star of Russia's biggest reality-TV shows; a fashion-loving socialite who is a couture habitué; the daughter of Russian president Vladimir Putin's late, beloved mentor Anatoly Sobchak—and now a major new face among Putin's growing opposition.
"I am one of the most famous people in Russia, which is maybe not modest, but it's true," says Sobchak, 30, in her pleasantly blunt English. "My ratings in Russia, after Putin, after [former president Dmitry] Medvedev, I'm in third place. Ninety-six percent of Russians recognize me."
Though her pedigree calls to mind Chelsea Clinton, her closest American equivalent to date would be Kim Kardashian. Thus the collective consternation when she launched herself into the political stratosphere by appearing at an antigovernment rally in Moscow on Christmas Eve and announcing to the throng, "I'm Ksenia Sobchak, and I have something to lose, but nevertheless I am here." Her family ties to Russia's autocratic leader make her turn against him all the more headline-making: Her father, a former mayor of St. Petersburg, was once Putin's boss and integral to his rise to power, while her mother, Lyudmila Narusova, remains an appointed member of parliament.
"Putin was her father's political protégé. And Ksenia has demonstrated loyalty to him for years, as has her mother," says Masha Gessen, author of the recent Putin biography The Man Without a Face. "Her coming out at the protests [in December and March, after Putin's reelection] has been very significant. Obviously her name and celebrity are massive, and when she speaks about Putin as someone who knows him, it has resonance."
Anatoly Sobchak's name still commands respect in Russia. Not only is he remembered for his charisma and democratic ideals, he also ascended to heroic rank for his resistance to the 1991 military coup. He remained a popular figure despite corruption charges that drove him to France in 1997. After the charges were dropped, he returned to Russia, only to die from a heart attack in 2000—under what some believe were suspicious circumstances—when his daughter was just 18. At the funeral, in a rare display of emotion, Putin wept openly next to a mournful young Sobchak and her mother.
Yet there is not a trace of her legacy's great weight in Sobchak's bubbly behavior at this moment. She's about to board a plane to Miami, where she'll tape the third season of Russia's Next Top Model. ("I'm like the Russian Tyra Banks," she says, giggling.) But before that she's putting her glasses on—her collection ranges from the Sarah Palinesque to red cat's-eyes—to interview the son of imprisoned billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky for one of her political talk shows, Sobchak.live. Another of her shows, Gosdep, was dropped from MTV Russia in February after one episode for being too controversial, she says. (Russian television is largely state-controlled.) It now airs on snob.ru, a Web site owned by Russian oligarch and New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who ran against Putin this year.
"It's a schizophrenic life," Sobchak says, "because while I'm on the beach in Miami waiting to choose the most beautiful model, I'll be reading Henry Kissinger books about Russian-American relations. Sometimes I feel like I'm Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, a prostitute by day and a perfect wife at night. I'm like Jekyll and Hyde."
Today she's in respectable Dr. Jekyll mode—makeup-free, her hair in barrettes, wearing a Miu Miu bird-print blouse, tan Zara slacks, and matching Martin Margiela brogues. But not so long ago, she fully embraced the blinged-out culture of New Russia. "I was beautiful and stupid, and I loved my life. I felt like a starving girl who was allowed into a candy shop, and I ate all the chocolates," Sobchak says of the heady days after she graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and began hosting the massively popular Dom-2, a spin on Big Brother, which she's done since 2004. "At that time there were no It girls in Russia—it was not like here," she says, waving her hand around the restaurant. "I always wore fashionable clothes, and my boyfriend was friends with Naomi Campbell and other international people, and he introduced me to that world."
She soon earned the nickname "the Russian Paris Hilton." By then her father had passed away, "my mother was totally not in this world, and she's never been into fashion," and Sobchak was making her own career choices. She posed for the covers of Playboy and Maxim, coauthored the best-selling How to Marry a Millionaire (she's dated several), launched a fragrance, and opened an exclusive Moscow restaurant, Tverbul.
Despite the tawdry photographs of herself that permanently litter the Internet, she is unabashed about her past. "I'm not ashamed. I had as much fun as you could possibly have. For a 20-year-old girl doing her first TV shows, it was so cool to be on Playboy's cover. But then five years ago, my life started changing. My dream was to do political journalism. I wanted real people and real problems. But it was only when I made my speech at the protests that people started taking me seriously."
What compelled her to take such a public stand? "I have money, I have lots of shows, and I'm popular, but at some point I thought, It's only for me," she says. "I've done charity, but that's not enough; it just buys personal popularity. When the protests happened, I finally had the chance to put my popularity behind the right cause. I am the only one of the opposition leaders who can speak to this mass audience."
She has no desire to run for office, however. "I'm a journalist," she says, ideally one with a career like Larry King's. "I love his show. I know it's hard to imagine that one person can host Top Model and have a political discussion. But that is what I'm proud of. To be Tyra Banks is cool, and to be Larry King is cool. But the coolest would be to be Tyra Banks and Larry King together."
It's this very combination that has fueled her critics. But to the skeptics, she responds, "I am who I am. Why should I hide because someone might say, 'How can she really care when she wears Chanel?' Actually, yes, I can care about justice even in Chanel heels."
Sobchak's message is that Russia must modernize and rid itself of corruption, or die. "What we have now are the ruins of a civilization. It is painful for me to see tourists looking at the Kremlin and the Hermitage. That's the civilization of people who don't exist anymore. I don't want to be like the Egyptians, living near the pyramids. I want Paris. I want the rebirth of Russia. We have lots of money and we can do it.
"Let us buy professionals and clinics and contracts with the best teachers from Harvard and Cambridge," she continues. "We must find a new Peter the Great who can rebuild the country to a modern level."
Though she has lost faith in Putin's leadership, Sobchak denies that her motives are personal. "I can't be objective because of my family's links to him. He is a pleasant man, but he has chosen a path I don't agree with." She last saw him two years ago at a memorial for her father. "He did a lot of good things for Russia, but for every leader there is a time. Now there is a young, creative class with their own values."
As part of this new breed, she feels free to speak frankly. "Putin needs to end the corruption, cut off the old system, and bring in new people. But I'm not sure he can do that because it would be like cutting off your own hands and legs." Sobchak likes to tell people that she witnessed electoral fraud, including one girl who she taped voting twice: "We caught them red-handed, but nobody is going to do anything about it."
Such declarations make her a target in her homeland, where dissension is not taken lightly. "She clearly has a lot of courage, like her father," says Anders Åslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., who knew the elder Sobchak. And Ksenia takes comfort in the idea that her father would approve. "I asked myself, 'If he were alive, would he go to the protests?' For me, the answer was yes, because he always fought for democracy. His memory matters more than any relationship with Mr. Putin."
She's already blundered into a John le Carré-worthy plot twist: She is being investigated for what she says are false accusations after a March incident involving journalists from a pro-Kremlin tabloid news site. They videotaped Sobchak meeting with opposition leaders at her restaurant and have alleged that she assaulted them and destroyed their camera. "In Russia, you don't need actual proof of anything, just a paper saying you've been injured, which they paid for, because everything's so corrupt," she says. "So I already feel the result of my actions."
Not to mention the impact on her relationship with her mother. Sobchak says they no longer discuss politics: "At first she cried. The closest thing I can compare it to is if you came out to your very conservative parents. My mother now avoids the topic. She's like, 'Hi, where are you?' 'I'm at the protest.' 'Okay, call me later. Are you wearing something warm?'" And with that, Sobchak puts her coat on and walks back out onto the New York sidewalks for one more day of anonymity.
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