Meet Russia’s own celebrity presidential candidate
Let one bleached-blond reality-TV celebrity become president of a global superpower, and suddenly they all want to get in on the act.
The improbable political rise of Russia’s Ksenia Sobchak, 36, a television and social-media darling, is the latest version.
“We all know [the] ‘Trump effect,’” Sobchak said Friday.
Despite her brash persona and complete lack of governing experience, the former Playboy pin-up is the only anti-corruption challenger going up against President Vladimir Putin when he tries to win a fourth term on March 18.
“Many people would vote for me, I’m quite sure … I know the rules of how brand works,” Sobchak said.
The jet-setting socialite and fashion plate long known as “Russia’s Paris Hilton” is making a U.S. trip this week to woo expatriate Russians, charm the American press, and perhaps meet up with President Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
“I want to show the people of Russia that there is another point of view,” she told the state-run RT news channel last week. “This is the goal of my campaign.”
Sobchak, a fixture of Moscow’s party scene since the early 2000s, is a ubiquitous presence in Russian pop culture. She has been the face of a string of high-profile ventures — her own fashion line, a perfume, three books, several films, a magazine, a rap video, and a steady succession of attention-getting TV slots — and has been a cover girl for Playboy Rus, Russian Glamour and more.
She’s a regular at fashion week in Paris and Milan, at glam international festivals like Cannes, and at red-carpet Russian events like the Moscow Film Festival and the Muz-TV music awards.
She chronicles it all, and continually pushes her brand, on an Instagram feed with 5.4 million followers.
She’s also political royalty: the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St. Petersburg, who mentored Putin during his student days and hired him for his first government job.
The tight alliance between the two men gave rise to rumors that Ksenia Sobchak is Putin’s goddaughter (she denies it). Her mother still serves as a pro-Putin legislator in the upper house of Russia’s parliament.
Sobchak says she told Putin of her plan to take a shot at his job before she announced it publicly last October — but insists that she is not doing his bidding.
“I think he was a bit surprised and he didn’t like the idea of me running because he was silent for quite a while,” she told the Sunday Times of London. “Then he said, ‘It’s your decision.’”
Her family ties, and the extensive coverage that her campaign has gotten on state-run television, make members of Russia’s opposition movement suspect that Sobchak is merely a pawn of the Kremlin.
Even so, having her name on the ballot will likely boost voter turnout by spicing up a lackluster race that Putin is guaranteed to win. The latest polls have him getting 68 percent of the vote — with Sobchak garnering a mere 1.5 percent.
If Russia’s ruler is hoping for fireworks, Sobchak can deliver. Her knack for sparking controversy goes back more than a decade.
Starting in 2004, her eight-year stint as host of the raunchy reality show “Dom-2” was a source of constant outrage for conservative viewers.
The “Big Brother”-like series isolated a group of contestants and gave them the task of building a house. The completed home was awarded to a couple chosen by the viewers — and to win fans, participants took to stripteases and on-camera sex acts.
“All of this is a form of luring young people into prostitution,” huffed one protester to the Moscow Times in 2005. Moscow City Council members tried to shut the show down and demanded that Sobchak be prosecuted as a pimp.
“[They] should thank us for our program instead of criticizing it,” Sobchak shrugged at the time. “It’s aired at the same time as the evening news, which is mainly about problems in our country that [politicians] are unable to solve. By watching ‘Dom-2’ young people at least don’t hear about them.”
She juggled several reality shows simultaneously for years. “Top Model Po-Russki” was an “America’s Next Top Model” spin-off. “Blonde in Chocolate” caricatured her glittery social life as she got drunk, swore, and changed her skimpy outfits on camera.
“This character is my hero,” she said of the show’s version of herself in 2007. “She can be in this pool with naked boys. She can be absurd. I am trying to speak to people through parody.”
But Sobchak’s entirely unserious career took a swerve when she made a surprise appearance at one of the massive anti-corruption protests that sprang up in 2011, after Putin announced plans to run for his third presidential term and parliamentary elections broke down amid allegations of fraud. Thousands took to the streets.
“I am Ksenia Sobchak, and I have something to lose by being here with you,” she announced to a crowd of 80,000 in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. They booed.
In the government crackdown that followed, Sobchak lost her TV hosting jobs and her home was raided by police. “Whether it’s prison or exile, they’re out to silence me,” she told the New York Times.
She morphed into a political talk show host on an independent online news channel. She began to wield social media as a weapon, mixing parody YouTube videos and opposition political content into the steady stream of selfies and product placement posts on her Instagram feed. She married film actor Maksim Vitorgan and gave birth to a son, now 14 months old.
Sobchak entered the presidential race under the slogan “Against All” — the Russian idiom meaning “none of the above”— with the support of the leftist Civil Initiative Party, which collected the 105,000 voter signatures required to get her name on the ballot. She has hired a veteran of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign as her political adviser.
“I am not making a claim to the role of professional politician,” she said in an Oct. 24 press conference. “I believe that it is important that the voice of my generation is heard at these elections.”
But by running as the anti-Putin, pro-reform candidate, she upended the plans of the opposition movement’s best-known leader, Alexei Navalny, who has been barred from the election and is organizing a boycott of the polls in protest.
“The people are really afraid of what’s going on in Russia; they are suffering with fear, sitting at home, doors locked, because they are afraid of their government,” Sobchak told RT News last week.
“After this [election], people like me will break this wall of autocracy,” she predicted. “I don’t want to take power. I want to break the wall of this autocratic regime.”