挑战普京的名媛 | 纽约时报

Russian Socialite Enters Race to Challenge President Putin

Ksenia Sobchak speaks to the crowd during opposition protests in Moscow in 2012. James Hill for The New York Times 

MOSCOW — A young socialite and television journalist whose father was a close ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, declared her intention on Wednesday to challenge him in the presidential election scheduled for next March, a move liable to split the already feeble liberal opposition.

莫斯科。一个年轻的社交界名媛和电视记者，父亲是俄国总统弗拉基米尔·普京的亲密盟友，周三宣布将在明年三月的总统大选中向普京发起挑战，该举动或将分裂本已虚弱不堪的自由主义反对派。

The journalist, Ksenia A. Sobchak, 35, announced her presidential run in a video online on YouTube and also published a letter in Vedomosti, Russia’s main business daily. She portrayed herself as a candidate for those who reject the status quo, a candidate who could give the struggling opposition a voice and challenge the tired, elderly candidates from established parties who have been around for decades.

35岁的记者卡欣尼亚·A·索布恰克在Youtube网线上视频宣布将参选总统，并在俄罗斯主流的商业日报上发表声明。她将自己塑造成拒绝维持现状的的候选人，旨在壮大在困苦中挣扎的反对派，挑战老迈政党推出的那些盘踞了几十年、令人厌烦的老年候选人。

“You want to show your active position, but your candidate is not authorized to run? You don’t have a candidate? Tick Sobchak,” she wrote in the newspaper. “You’re just using a legal and peaceful opportunity to say ‘Enough! I’m fed up with this!’”

“想表达你的积极立场，可你的候选人无权参选？或是还没有候选人？勾选索布恰克吧，”她在报纸上写道。“你只需使用合法和和平的方式，说‘够了，我受够这一切了！’”

The main liberal opposition candidate, Aleksei A. Navalny, has been banned from running because of convictions in fraud cases that he has called politically motivated. He has been campaigning anyway, and set up campaign offices across the country, a rare move for someone without the backing of a mainstream party.

自由主义反对派主力候选人阿里克谢·纳瓦尔尼被禁止参选，因为他被控欺诈，他认为指控有政治目的。可他一直在备战，在全国建立了选战办公室，该举动很罕见，他没有主流政党支持。

Ms. Sobchak is the daughter of a former mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly A. Sobchak, who was Mr. Putin’s mentor for years and who died in 2000 while campaigning for Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin managed Mr. Sobchak’s final, unsuccessful campaign in 1996; his animosity toward electoral politics is said to date partly from that loss.

索布恰克是圣彼得堡前市长安纳托利·A·索布恰克的女儿，多年来，老索布恰克是普京先生的导师，2000年为普京选举造势时去世。普京曾负责索布恰克1996年最后一次不成功的参选，据说他敌视选举政治的部分原因可以追溯到那次失利。

Portrayed sometimes as the Russian equivalent of Paris Hilton, Ms. Sobchak has long exhibited her upscale lifestyle on social media, including Instagram, where she has some 5.2 million followers. Her account is an endless parade of Paris fashion shows, yoga retreats, yachts and expensive restaurants. She is married with an infant son.

索布恰克女士有时被说成俄国的帕里斯·希尔顿，她一直在Instagram等社交媒体上展示自己的高端生活方式，拥有520万粉丝。她的账号不停地显摆着巴黎时装秀、瑜伽疗养、游艇和昂贵的酒店。她带着一名男婴结婚。

After announcing her candidacy, Ms. Sobchak, in a 30-minute interview on TV Rain, or Dozhd, a small opposition television channel, said she had recently seen Mr. Putin to interview him about her father for a documentary and told him of her intention to run. He did not seem pleased, she said.

宣布参选后，索布恰克女士接受了反对派频道TV Rain（或Dozhd）电视台三十分钟的采访，采访中她说最近见到普京，因为做一部关于父亲的纪录片要采访普京，她告诉普京自己有意参选。她说他看起来不高兴。

“He said that every person can make their own decisions and take responsibility for them too,” said Ms. Sobchak. “I didn’t feel that he liked my decision.”

“他说每个人都可以自己做出决定，并为这些决定承担责任，”索布恰克女士说。“我认为他不喜欢我的决定。”

Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, described Ms. Sobchak as “talented” in a comment to TV Rain but suggested that she had a lot to learn.

普京先生的发言人德米特里·S·佩斯科夫对TV Rain电台说，索布恰克女士“有才华”，但表示她还有很多东西需要学习。

“She’ll have to make herself familiar with this from scratch,” Mr. Peskov said. “Politics is different from journalism and from show business. This is a completely different matter.”

“她不得不从头学起，”佩斯科夫说。“从政与当记者和做演员不一样。这完全是两码事。”

Some leaders of the liberal opposition expressed dismay, accusing her of being a Kremlin stooge and a spoiler candidate meant to inject a measure of excitement and legitimacy into a dull race. Mr. Putin, having run Russia as president or prime minister for almost 18 years, is due to seek his fourth term as president with no real opposition. He has yet to formally announce that he will run, but is expected to do so by December.

自由主义反对派部分领导人表达了失望之情，指责她是克里姆林宫的走狗，是出来搞破坏的候选人，旨在为沉闷的大选注入一些激情和合法性。普京先生连续十八年担任俄罗斯总统或总理，并将连续四次担任总统，他没有真正的反对派。普京还没有正式宣布要参选，但预计12月会宣布。

Sergey Udaltsov, a political activist recently released from prison, compared it to the last campaign, in 2012, when many believed that the Kremlin convinced Mikhail D. Prokhorov, a billionaire businessman and the principal owner of the Brooklyn Nets, to run.

最近出狱的政治活动人士谢尔盖·乌达里佐夫将之比作2012年大选，许多人认为当时克里姆林宫劝说布鲁克林篮网队大股东、亿万富翁米哈伊尔·D·普罗霍洛夫参选。

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny leaving a police station in Moscow last month. Maxim Zmeyev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

“The Sobchak thing is too obvious,” Mr. Udaltsov wrote on Twitter, using a Russian expression for something evident: “The Kremlin’s ears stick out for a kilometer.”

“索布恰克太明显了，”乌达里索夫在推特上写道，他用了句俄罗斯老话，“克里姆林的耳朵竖出一公里了。”

Mr. Navalny and his top aides are serving yet another brief prison sentence over their campaign organizing, so they could not respond to the formal announcement. But the two camps were already sniping at each other last month, when rumors that Ms. Sobchak might run first began to circulate.

纳尔瓦尼先生和他的高级幕僚还在短期服刑期间，罪名是组织参选，因此他们无法正式表明态度。但上个月，传言索布恰克女士可能参选时，两个阵营已经开始了互掐。

Mr. Navalny said he was “frustrated and upset” at the prospect, while his campaign manager, Leonid Volkov, said it seemed like a bad joke. “It would be better if this remained a joke,” he wrote on Facebook. “Or else it will turn into a very stupid story.”

纳尔瓦尼说，他对这件事“感到失望和恼火”，他的选战经理里奥尼德·沃尔科夫说看起来像个糟糕的玩笑。“如果真是个玩笑那倒还好，”他在脸谱上写道。“否则这将是一件非常愚蠢的事。”

Ms. Sobchak said in her TV interview that she hoped to gain Mr. Navalny’s support after he is released, and said she would discuss withdrawing if he were somehow allowed to run.

索布恰克接受电视采访时说，她希望在纳尔瓦尼获释后获得她的支持，并表示如果他获准参选，她可能考虑退出。

In her work as a television journalist and talk-show host, Ms. Sobchak has been unofficially banned as a presenter on state television since she joined the anti-Kremlin protests in 2012. Some portrayed her candidacy as a means to escape from the confines of TV Rain, which can only be watched online or on cable.

在做电视记者和脱口秀主持人期间，索布恰克女士因2012年加入反克里姆林宫抗议而被禁止在国家电视台播报。有人将她参选视作摆脱TV Rain桎梏的办法，该电视台只能在线或购买有线电视观看。

“She is too glamorous for Navalny’s electorate, but she can be supported by people who are protesting against the country becoming increasingly conservative, by people who are against clericalism,” said Aleksei V. Makarkin, a political analyst and deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.

“对纳尔瓦尼的选民而言，她太过迷人了，但抗议国家变得日益保守的人以及反对东正教权主义的人会支持她，”莫斯科智库政治技术中心副主任、政治分析人士阿里克谢·V·马卡金说。

Although it is impossible to gauge her support at this early stage, he said her main motivation seemed personal. “Sobchak doesn’t want to create a party,” he said in an interview, “I think she wants to be a star.”

尽管在早期还不可能评估她的支持者，他表示她的主要出于个人自愿。“索布恰克不想建党，”他在采访中说。“我想她想出名。”

Others were taken with the idea.

也有人认为这也不错。

“Personally, I don’t like Navalny’s dictatorial tendencies and believe that Sobchak is a good candidate to consolidate representatives of the liberal opposition,” said Vladislav Inozemtsev, a political analyst who leads the Center for Post-Industrial Studies, another Moscow think tank.

“从个人角度说，我不喜欢纳尔瓦尼的独裁倾向，我相信索布恰克是个不错的候选人，可以团结自由主义反对派代表，”位于莫斯科的智库后工业研究中心主任、政治分析人士弗拉迪斯拉夫·伊诺泽姆采夫说。

“Russia needs a leader who will be more of a visionary, instead of a manager with a lot of experience at stealing government money or being obsequious to the superiors,” he said. “In any case, this leader should be a modern, open-minded person. In these terms, Ksenia is an ideal candidate.”

“俄国需要一个更有远见的领导人，而非一个对贪污公款、谄媚上级经验丰富的管理者，”他说，“不管怎么说，领导人应该是一位现代、开明的人。从这些角度讲，卡欣尼亚是个理想的候选人。”

There are considerable hurdles for any opposition candidates entering the presidential race, and particularly a woman. A candidate has to be either nominated by a party in the federal Parliament, called the Duma, or collect 300,000 signatures from at least 40 Russian regions. The latter is considered impossible without vast financial resources or months of organizing.

反对派候选人参加总统大选有相当多的障碍，尤其对一个女人而言。候选人或者要被联邦议院杜马中的一个政党提名，或是在至少40个俄罗斯地区集齐30万签名。没有庞大的财力和数月的组织，后者通常是不可能实现的。

In addition, a recent poll by the Levada Center, a research organization, suggested that 53 percent of respondents were opposed to a woman’s being president of Russia and 32 percent said no woman in Russia was currently fit for the job.

另外，研究机构列瓦达中心最近民调显示，53%的受访者反对女人当俄罗斯总统，32%表示现在俄罗斯没有女人适合当总统。

TV Rain said Ms. Sobchak’s campaign adviser would be Vitali Shkliarov, a Russian who worked on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign in the United States. In recent months, Mr. Shkliarov has been preaching the gospel of a more equitable, more disruptive political process in Russia, pushing many novice politicians to run successfully for seats in local municipal councils in Moscow.

TV Rain表示，索布恰克的竞选顾问可能是维塔利·什克利亚罗夫，他2016年美国大选中效力于伯尼·桑德斯。最近几个月来，什克利亚洛夫先生一直在宣扬在俄国推行更加平等、更具颠覆性的政治进程，推动许多政治新人在莫斯科成功入选市议会。

Over all, the general sense was that whether she was a Kremlin stooge or not, the entrance of a glamorous young woman into mainstream Russian politics would make what many consider a farcical race even more fantastic.

总而言之，无论她是否是克里姆林宫的内奸，一个靓丽的年轻女子进入俄罗斯主流政治，都会让众人眼中的闹剧更加异想天开。

“A circus with horses,” Viktor A. Shenderovich, one of the country’s most prominent political comedians, wrote on Facebook. “A new program.”

“有马的马戏团，”该国最著名的政治喜剧演员之一维克多·A·申德罗维奇在脸谱上说。“新节目上演了。”