Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Parsing the Marriage of Russia’s Paris Hilton

February 5, 2013 at 3:30 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

The wedding of a 31-year-old Russian socialite is hardly political news, unless the woman in question is Ksenia Sobchak.

Just a year ago, Moscow’s ultimate “it” girl threw herself passionately into the “snow revolution,” a then-powerful movement of middle-class Russians fed up with Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial tendencies. She even dated one of the most prominent anti-Putin activists, Ilya Yashin, and suffered political persecution -- of a kind.