'The Stiletto in Putin’s Side'

Opposition activist Ksenia Sobchak in her Moscow restaurant.

At a few minutes before 8 in the morning on the eve of Russia Day last month — the holiday that since the demise of the old Soviet Union has marked the birth of the new, free Russia — eight men, some armed, swept silently into an upscale apartment building in the heart of Moscow. When the knock came, Ksenia Sobchak, a 30-year-old native of St. Petersburg who many believe is Vladimir Putin’s goddaughter (she says she isn’t), answered the door in a negligee. If you read the tabloids, whether in Moscow or London, Sobchak is “the Paris Hilton of Russia,” the country’s reigning, and most outrageous, socialite. But if you ask her, after a season of discontent in which tens of thousands of her compatriots have taken to the streets in protest, she is “a political journalist.”