Democracy in Petersburg

In the local elections of March 1989 Leningraders were given a choice of Communist Party members to vote for and they elected their first quasi- democratic city council. One of these new deputies was a little-known lawyer by the name of Anatoly Sobchak who squeaked by after two run-offs to win his district. Sobchak rose to the helm of a group of reform-minded deputies and in 1990 was elected Petersburg's mayor. Under his leadership the city slowly opened itself to foreign investment and free- market development, and remained calm during the days in August 1991 and October 1993 when Moscow freaked out.

In 1996, in a city-wide election Sobchak was ousted by one of his former deputy mayors, Yakovlev, who has, on the face of it, continued along the same reform and privatisation path as his predecessor. It was in 1991 that Leningraders overwhelmingly voted to rename their city St. Petersburg and since then the city has re-opened the "Window onto Europe," only to get mooned by Estonian border guards.