Ksenia Sobchak’s Strange Russian Presidential Campaign

It’s the first day proper of AoIR 2018, and I’m starting with a panel on politics on the Russian Internet; the first speaker is Galina Miazhevich, whose focus is on the presidential campaign of celebrity candidate Ksenia Sobchak, who ran against Vladimir Putin in the March 2018 election and was exposed to a considerable amount of trolling and mockery.

Sobchak, then aged 36, is one of the most influential women in Russia; her father was mayor of Russia and well-connected to the Putin regime, and there are rumours that Sobchak is Putin’s goddaughter. She is a Russian socialite (‘Russia’s Paris Hilton’) who became a TV journalist and activist and has had considerable success as a business woman and writer.

After she married and became a mother she repositioned herself as a more mature celebrity and engaged more with political circles opposing Putin’s autocratic rule, and eventually created her own political party to support her presidential campaign. (This met with considerable opposition in the still strongly patriarchal Russian context.)

She made the announcement of her candidacy in an online video set in her (?) kitchen, appealing to stereotypes of womanhood; the style and setting of the video was immediately mocked by Russian comedians. More generally, Sobchak was mocked and attacked variously for her assertive style as a modern woman, as well as for not being strong and serious enough to be President; details and photos from her past live(s) as a socialite were also dragged up, and she was accused of being a stooge candidate created by Putin’s camp itself.

The style of her campaign was also mocked; one of her slogans was that she was the candidate “against everyone”, presumably meaning against the establishment but also misread as indicating her liberal elite status and separation from ordinary, socially conservative people. Campaign imagery was also altered to draw connections with Ukraine’s failed leader Yulia Tymoshenko.

Sobchak countered some of this with self-mockery and a chameleon-like persona, and by taking a deliberately ironic and evasive approach to her statements. This also meant that she oscillated between more liberal and more conservative statements, however. Her stance might be best described as post- rather than anti-feminist, but exactly what this means in practice remains unclear and often backfired. Overall, of course, these difficulties are not limited to her campaign, but experienced by many celebrity political candidates.