St. Petersburg's first mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, made a huge contribution to the emergence of a new Russia from the ashes of the Soviet Union, Prime Minster Vladimir Putin said on Saturday.
Putin was speaking in St. Petersburg on the 10th anniversary of the death of the man who brought him into public life. Sobchak made Putin St. Petersburg deputy mayor in 1994.
"His role in the establishment of a new Russia was colossal," Putin said after visiting his mentor's grave. "He was a democrat to the very roots of his being."
Praised as a reformer, Sobchak was mayor of Russia's northern capital from 1991-96 and was responsible for restoring then Leningrad's original name of St. Petersburg.
He also was earlier credited with persuading military commanders not deploy tanks in support of an ill-fated 1991 coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
His widow, Lyudmila Narusova, praised her late husband's decision to become one of the leaders of the 1980s movement for democratic reform.
"This required courage, because he did it not for the system, but in spite of it," she said as she and her daughter, showbiz celebrity Kseniya, attended with Putin a museum dedicated to Sobchak's political life.
"This was a man who loved Russia, who loved people," St Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko said earlier, also calling Sobchak a "man of conscience who knew no fear."
After his defeat in 1996 mayoral elections, a criminal investigation was opened against Sobchak on fraud charges and he fled to France. He returned in 1999, with Putin soon to begin his first stint as premier, and the charges against him were later dropped.
Sobchak died of a heart attack in Russia's western exclave of Kaliningrad in 2000, where he had been sent by Putin as his representative.
"He did not just die, he perished as a result of persecution," Putin said after his death.
ST. PETERSBURG, February 20 (RIA Novosti)
