Sergei Sobyanin: Putin’s Technocrat Mayor Keeping Moscow Calm

He is expected to be comfortably re-elected in a mayoral ballot this weekend.

When President Vladimir Putin called up hundreds of thousands of men to fight in Ukraine one year ago, it sparked a frantic exodus of Russians from the country.

But in Moscow, Sobyanin was quick to bring calm, announcing less than a month later that mobilisation there had ended.

Despite regular Ukrainian drone assaults on Moscow, the 65-year-old has positioned himself as the man who keeps the capital insulated from the conflict’s devastating ripple effects.

“Despite the huge number of difficulties, problems, and crises that we all go through together with the country, we win, we overcome these problems and become even stronger,” Sobyanin said at a city forum in August.

For political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, Sobyanin’s ability to retain a steady hand over the 13 million residents of Russia’s centre of power has broad ramifications for Putin.

“To keep control, you have to be very careful with people in Moscow. It’s better not to irritate them,” she told AFP.

Born in a remote village in the Siberian region of Khanty-Mansi, Sobyanin briefly worked at a metal pipe factory before entering local politics in the 1980s.

By the time he was appointed mayor in 2010, Sobyanin already had more than four years’ experience running the oil-rich Siberian region of Tyumen. In 2005 he was tapped by Putin to head his presidential administration.

Sobyanin’s straightforward leadership style and background as a former governor — as opposed to the ex-KGB strongmen in Putin’s inner circle — means often his political weight goes unnoticed.

But the fact he is allowed to run Russia’s most important city with minimal interference shows he is trusted by Putin, analysts said.

“He benefits from serious political autonomy,” Stanovaya told AFP.

And there is no danger of him having political ambitions, she added.

“People who work with Putin can’t have political ambitions. They just can’t. The system is built in a way that no one can”.

As mayor he closed many of Moscow’s bustling, crime-ridden markets and oversaw massive infrastructure projects, including the biggest expansion of the Moscow metro system in decades.

He also introduced a bicycle-sharing network and launched a controversial plan to bulldoze Soviet-era prefab blocks to make way for new housing estates.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Sobyanin was the first Russian official to announce a lockdown and imposed more stringent measures in the capital than in other cities.

But his image as a moderate reformer took a hit in 2019, when police cracked down on mass protests over widely criticised local elections from which many independent candidates were barred.

“Sobyanin could not manage the situation in a way that would be understandable for liberals,” Stanovaya said.

Thousands were detained during the protests, as were thousands more in 2022 when Russia announced its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

And he maintained his predecessor’s ban on gay pride parades in Moscow.

All his challengers in this weekend’s vote have been approved by Russia’s political establishment and with local media acting as a PR machine for his campaign, he is unlikely to lose.

“The 2023 Moscow mayoral elections are organised in such a way that no matter how you vote, you vote for Putin,” jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny said ahead of the vote.

Navalny himself lost against Sobyanin in the city’s 2013 elections.

“You can vote, go to the polling station for curiosity’s sake, or ignore them. They are not worth discussing at all,” he said.