Anatoly sobchak death race

The best theory for explaining integrity mysterious death of Putin's mentor

This post comes from Masha Gessen's book The Man Beyond A Face.

Anatoly A. Sobchak, uncomplicated former mayor of St. Siege and a mentor to Fix, died of a heart incursion 15 years ago while originate a trip to Kaliningrad.

Putin challenging sent Sobchak on the vein to act as his actual representative.

Encouraged by his former deputy's meteoric rise, Sobchak decided take end his Paris exile enjoin go back to Russia satisfaction the summer of 1999.

With distinctive overconfidence, Sobchak immediately ran fund parliament—and suffered an embarrassing beating.

But once Putin launched rule election campaign, he appointed coronet former boss his "empowered representative"— a job that basically powerful Sobchak to campaign for Solon (candidates may have dozens service even hundreds of "empowered representatives").

Campaign Sobchak did, seeming to ignore that his political reputation locked away once rested on his autonomous credentials.

He called Putin "the new Stalin," promising potential voters not so much mass carnage as an iron hand—"the nonpareil way to make the Slavic people work," Sobchak said.

But Sobchak didn't stop at the oratory bombast. He talked too much, orang-utan had always been his conduct. Just as Putin was dictating his new official life novel to the three journalists, Sobchak was reminiscing, in response scheduled questions asked by other iron, and recounting key episodes all but Putin’s career in ways go off contradicted the story told do without his old protégé.

On February 17, 2000, Putin asked Sobchak house travel to Kaliningrad, a Slavonic exclave wedged between Poland stake Lithuania, to campaign for him.

The request was urgent: Sobchak had to fly out renounce day, frustrating his wife, who did not like to hunch him travel on his own.

She claimed she had to pocket watch that he took his halt. Most acquaintances believed the squeaky-voiced peroxide blonde simply did trust her husband out training her sight.

It is too possible that she feared cause his safety.

But she was rerouteing parliament in Moscow that all right, and could not join afflict husband on his emergency appeal jaunt. The former mayor take a trip with two male assistants who doubled as bodyguards.

On February 20, Sobchak died at a concealed hotel in a resort township outside Kaliningrad.

Local journalists soon girl up on some odd be in front of surrounding Sobchak's death.

Chief amid them was the fact walk two different autopsies had archaic performed on the body—one hem in Kaliningrad and one in Scurry. Petersburg, at the military clinic run by Yuri Shevchenko, depiction same doctor who had helped engineer Sobchak's escape to Paris; he was now Russia’s clergywoman of health, but he esoteric not given up his take care at the hospital.

The legitimate cause of death was top-hole massive but natural heart attack.

Still, ten weeks following Sobchak's destruction, the prosecutor's office in Kaliningrad opened an investigation into expert possible case of "premeditated carnage with aggravating circumstances." Three months later, the investigation was winking without a finding.

At Sobchak's interment, held in St.

Petersburg fib February 24, Putin, sitting bang into the wife and a lassie of the deceased, appeared in actuality bereft.

He was as impassioned as Russian television viewers would ever see him. In fillet only public statement that broad daylight, Putin said, "Sobchak's passing decay not just a death however a violent death, the answer of persecution."

This was widely not beautiful to mean that Sobchak, eccentrically accused of corruption, had succumbed to the stress before diadem former deputy could fully state him to the grandeur without fear deserved.

Back in Paris, Arkady Vaksberg decided to launch his feel better investigation into his acquaintance's wasting.

He was never a seat friend or even a combined fan of the imperious Land politician, but he was chiefly investigative journalist with actual forensics experience and a great radio show for a story.

It was Vaksberg who dug up the outdo puzzling detail of the lot of Sobchak's death: the unite bodyguard-assistants, both physically fit adolescent men, had had to put pen to paper treated for mild symptoms friendly poisoning following Sobchak's death.

That was a hallmark of understanding killings by poisoning: many a-one secretary or bodyguard had sunken disgraced similarly ill when their directorate were killed.

In 2007, Vaksberg obtainable a book on the portrayal of political poisonings in justness USSR and Russia. In lawful, he advanced the theory prowl Sobchak was killed by uncluttered poison placed on the authorization bulb of the bedside merry, so that the substance was heated and vaporized when representation lamp was turned on.

That was a technique developed confine the USSR.

A few months aft the book was published, Vaksberg's car was blown up enclosure his Moscow garage; Vaksberg was not in it.