Even by Russian standards, Ksenia Sobchak is a rather contradictory public figure. Having launched her television career as an announcer on Russia’s remake of ‘Big Brother’ (‘Dom-2’), Sobchak became a political talk show host on TV Rain, one of Russia’s few independent news channels.
The daughter of the late Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St Petersburg and a close friend of Vladimir Putin, Ksenia Sobchak was also a prominent opposition figure in Moscow’s 2011-2012 protest movement, despite persistent rumours that the Russian president is secretly her godfather.
Herself a scion of privilege, in 2011 Sobchak appeared in a viral video chastising Vasily Yakimenko, leader of the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, for lunching at a fashionable and expensive Moscow restaurant. Recently, following the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, Sobchak was reported to have permanently left Russia after she was named on a ‘hit-list’ of anti-government activists. Sobchak, who regularly travels abroad, denies she has gone into exile.
