Lyubov Sobol’s Hope for Russia
With Alexey Navalny in prison, one of his closest aides is carrying on the lonely work of the opposition.
By Masha Gessen
Sobol, who grew up with her mother and sister in a working-class exurb of Moscow, got hooked on a Soviet miniseries based on the Sherlock Holmes stories. She wanted to be a private detective when she grew up, but adults told her that those didn’t exist anymore, so she figured she would become a police investigator. As a teen-ager, she read the court statements of the jurists who participated in pre-revolutionary Russia’s brief experiment with jury trials, and she decided to become a lawyer. She was admitted to the Moscow State University law department—considered the best in the country, full of rich kids with connections...
In early 2011, Navalny wrote that he was assembling a team of lawyers to “do the dull, methodical work of writing complaints, filing complaints, and attending hearings in the courts and anti-monopoly committees.” To Sobol, this sounded like a dream job: corporate law meets Sherlock Holmes. In one of her job interviews with Navalny, she told him, “I’m happy to meet you because I’ve been reading you for a long time, and I’m glad that you haven’t been killed or arrested yet.”
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/lyubov-sobols-hope-for-russia