His father, Aleksander Antonovich, was a railroad engineer of Polish and Czech origin, and his mother, Nadezhda Andreyevna Litvinova, was an accountant of Russian and Ukrainian origin. In , the family moved to Uzbekistan , where Anatoly lived until before entering Stavropol Law College. In , he transferred to Leningrad State University. They had a daughter called Maria Sobchak, born in , who is currently a St.
Petersburg State University. After graduating from Leningrad State University, he worked for three years as a lawyer in Stavropol , then returned to Leningrad State University for graduate studies β After obtaining his Ph. They had a daughter, Ksenia Sobchak. After obtaining his D. He was very popular among law students, especially for his mildly anti-government comments.
In , after election laws changed during Perestroika , he was elected as an independent candidate to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union. He was one of only a few deputies who had a legal background, so he contributed enormously to most of the laws created from to He also was a chairman of the Parliamentary Commission on the Investigation of the events of 9 April in Tbilisi.
The Commission condemned the military, which was blamed for many deaths when dispersing demonstrators. The Commission's report made it more difficult to use military force against civil demonstrations in the Soviet Union and Russia.
He was a member of the President's Consultative Council during Mikhail Gorbachev 's tenure and contributed to legislation that originated from the presidential administration. After the Soviet Union was dissolved in , Sobchak was not a member of the central Parliament but was a member of Yeltsin's Presidential Council and the chairman of the Constitutional Assembly that prepared the Constitution of the Russian Federation in The constitution is often informally called Sobchak's constitution , although its real authors have been somewhat less known.
