With his mother when he was about six years old
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on October 7, 1952 in Leningrad. His paternal grandfather worked, among other things, as a cook for Lenin and later for Stalin. Putin’s father, Vladimir, was a laborer and took an active part in Soviet anti-religious campaigns as a youth. His mother Maria worked as a secretary, later as a cleaning lady and night watchman.
The family lived in Leningrad in a communal apartment. Because of his bad behavior – he ran away from home and made his neighborhood unsafe with other street children – he was denied entry into the pioneer organization in the early years. In the upper grades, Putin became more diligent and enrolled voluntarily in German. In 1975 Putin completed his law studies at Leningrad State University. One of his lecturers was the later reform politician Anatoly Sobchak, with whom Putin was an assistant for some time. He was then able to realize his childhood dream of working for the KGB. The prerequisite for this was the completion of a special course of the KGB in Moscow in 1976.
He was then assigned to the KGB’s elite branch, First Headquarters (Foreign Reconnaissance), where he served until 1990. In 1984 Putin completed special training at the KGB University in Moscow and a year later moved to Dresden. In addition to observing and analyzing developments in the Federal Republic of Germany, his main task was to recruit GDR citizens who were willing to leave the country for the KGB. In return, he promised to support her wish to leave the country with the Stasi. In order to find further contacts, Putin drove regularly to the Leipzig Trade Fair. His wife, who comes from Königsberg, studied Romance studies at the philological faculty of the Leningrad State University and also speaks German, later described these years in Dresden as the best of her life. During this time, Putin was able to perfect his knowledge of German.
After the collapse of the communist regime in East Germany, which he was able to follow on site, Putin was called back to Moscow in 1990. With the rank of KGB lieutenant colonel, he left the KGB and became the assistant to the pro-rector of Leningrad State University for international affairs – a task that had to be carried out under KGB supervision. In the same year he became an adviser to Sobchak in his position as chairman of the Leningrad City Soviet. After Sobchak’s first free election as mayor of St. Petersburg in 1991, Putin became chairman of the city’s committee for foreign relations and from 1994 also one of Sobchak’s three first deputies.
Putin became Sobchak’s right-hand man, who is said to have made almost no decision without first consulting with Putin. Putin allegedly played his part in allowing various Western companies to settle in St. Petersburg. As part of the visit program of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg – Hamburg, Putin often traveled to the Hanseatic city. In 1995 Putin became active in party politics and took over the leadership of the St. Petersburg regional organization of Chernomyrdin’s movement Our House Russia (UHR). He organized the election campaign for the State Duma elections in December 1995 for UHR in St. Petersburg. A year later, Sobchak was not re-elected mayor of St. Petersburg. Instead of joining a corporation, which would not have been difficult for Putin in St. Petersburg, he submitted his doctoral thesis to the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg on the topic “Strategic planning of the renewal of the raw material base of a region on the basis of the development of market-economy relations”.
After Sobchak’s electoral defeat in 1996, Putin went to Moscow as deputy chief of the chancellery (responsible, among other things, for the Kremlin’s property and thus for Yeltsin and his family). In 1997, he was promoted to Chief of Control of the Presidential Administration with the rank of Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration. In this role, he oversaw the implementation of laws and presidential decrees throughout the country. At the same time, in 1997, he became a member of the Security Council Commission on Economic Security.
In May 1998, Putin was promoted – but only for three months – to the position of First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration with responsibility for “work with the regions”. In this capacity, he oversaw the drafting of contracts on the delimitation of competences between Moscow and the regions. In July 1998, Yeltsin put him in charge of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the domestic successor to the KGB. Putin
reorganized the Lubyanka, the seat of the FSB. A number of political scandals occurred during this period that suggested FSB involvement. These included the prosecution of environmentalists who exposed the disastrous condition of the decommissioned nuclear submarines with their nuclear reactors still in operation, and the scandal surrounding the dismissal of Attorney General Yuriy Skuratov, who was charged with compromising material after investigating the narrower Surroundings of the President had initiated.
In March 1999, Yeltsin gave Putin the additional task of Secretary of the Security Council, of which he had been a permanent member since October 1998. In 1999, Putin made five trips to Spain, spending weekends at Berezovsky’s house next to houses of mafia suspects on the Sotogrande coast in the south-west of the country. Putin flew to Gibraltar and sailed in Spanish waters without notifying the Spanish authorities of his presence, which he was required by law to do.10 After Stepashin’s sacking, Yeltsin appointed Putin acting prime minister on August 9, 1999, allegedly with Chubais’s intercession.
At the same time, the President recommended Putin as his preferred successor to the presidency. Putin also immediately announced his candidacy for the highest office in the state. On August 16, 1999, after his nomination received the constitutionally required approval of the State Duma, he was appointed Prime Minister by Yeltsin. After Yeltsin’s resignation on December 31, 1999, he became Acting President. On March 26, he was elected President in the first ballot.
But there is another version, a scandalous claim
According to her, the real birthplace of our hero is the village of Terehino, Perm Krai. Now that village doesn’t exist anymore, it was destroyed, it’s dead. In Russia, villages often die, it’s a common thing. His mother’s name was Vera Nikolaevna Putina, born in 1926, his father was a certain Platon Privalov, an alcoholic and bigamist. According to this version, Putin was born in 1950. Shortly after his birth, his mother left Platon Privalov and went to Georgia, where she still lives. Her second husband is Georgian Georgi Osipashvili, from whom she gave birth to 10 (!) Children. But Osipashvili did not want to accept Vladimir Putin as his own child. Then Vera sent Volodya to Peter, where he was adopted by her childless relative, the same Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin. Already in Georgia, without a father, without the care and caress of his parents, Volodya Putin grew up closed and frowning. He became addicted to fishing, which fully explains some psychological traits of the current ruler of Russia.
Since then, Putin has hated Georgians as an ethnic group and as a group of people with some common ethno-cultural traits. This explains the anti-Georgian character of his often completely unmotivated policy. Some say the reason lies in former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, whom Putin treats with great reserve. However, the Cold War between Russia and Georgia began under the former President of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze. The visa regime was first introduced in 2002 for a CIS country so closely linked to Russia. It is a well-known fact that in 2012 Putin ended the relationship with his goddaughter, Ksenia Sobchak, whom he almost considered a daughter, when he learned that she had started hosting a program on Georgian TV channel PIK. There are a few more such examples.
The mysterious childhood is one of the reasons for his behavior and therefore his fate. Orphanage, years without a father – this is the generator of many important motives in the behavior of the current President of Russia.
One of the first to try to solve the mystery of Putin’s birth and childhood is the famous journalist Artyom Borovik, owner of the media group “Sovershenno sekretno” from 1991 to 2000, successor and student of the legendary Yulian Semyonov, screenwriter of the Soviet series “17 Spring Moments” about the secret service officer Maxim Isaev, who operated in Berlin during the Second World War under the guise of a Standartenfuhrer of the SS Stirlitz. According to legend, after watching this series, Putin decided to join the KGB.
In all likelihood, Borovik relies on sources close to foreign intelligence agencies and his former boss, Yevgeny Primakov. Artyom Borovik died on March 9, 2000 in a plane crash involving the private plane in which he was flying with oil businessman Zia Bazhaev, a partner of the Rosneft company. The plane crashed seconds after takeoff from the runway at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. After this disaster, Putin’s aide-de-camp Igor Sechin (later famous in the Yukos case) informally took Bajaev’s place at Rosneft. I have repeatedly suggested that liberal journalists pick up this story, but no one dared.
Don’t fly private jets if you know something you shouldn’t!
I have no idea if the late Borovik was looking in the right direction. But we cannot fail to note that among Vladimir Putin’s friends who played a huge role in his ascension to the Russian throne, Roman Abramovich stands out, one of the richest people in Russia, former owner of the oil company “Sibneft” and treasurer of the Boris Yeltsin family, as well as Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s son-in-law and former head of the Kremlin administration. Both were fatherless at an early age. Perhaps that is why they understand Putin like no other and trust him that he will not lie to them and will not sell their interests if he becomes the all-powerful Russian tsar whom Russian national consciousness allows to stand above the law and above the law! Are there many rulers in Russia who do not betray the people who put them in power? Almost nobody before Putin. With the exception of Catherine II, who is an exception, but even for her, especially in the later years of her reign, the heroes who elevated her to the throne no longer play an important role.
In all likelihood, that’s where Vladimir’s growing interest in orphans and adoption issues comes from. At the end of 2012, the infamous “Magnitsky Act” was passed in the USA, which bans Russian corrupt and human rights violators from entering the country and at the same time allows the American assets of these “bad guys” to be confiscated. For some time, the Kremlin has been struggling to come up with a symmetrical response to Washington’s actions, which Moscow sees as genuine discourtesy. And he notes: Russia prohibits US citizens from adopting orphans from Russia with a special law called the “Dima Yakovlev Law” (that’s the name of a Russian boy adopted by an American family who allegedly died from being beaten by his new parents). It is difficult to understand where the symmetry lies in this case.
With this law they are not punishing America, but Russian children who are forced to live in run-down orphanages, which causes horror and disgust in every normal person. In fact, the authors of the “Dima Yakovlev Law”, including the scandalous lawyer Pavel Astakhov, the so-called Plenipotentiary Representative for Children’s Rights in the Russian Federation, are pursuing their own commercial interests. Astakhov wants to ban foreign adoptions in Russia altogether (perhaps even now) in order to get huge funds from the bottomless federal budget to implement his “Russia without Orphans” program, which provides financial incentives for the adoption of children from orphanages in Russia.
The $20 billion program was deemed too risky even by the Russian federal government, which vetoed its implementation in late 2012. But the work is not in Astakhov, whose name history will hardly remember. The crux of the matter is President Putin: why is he agreeing to this essentially anti-orphan law? Is it because big America doesn’t adopt him and become his good mother in the international arena? Or because Vladimir feels like a real orphan compared to distant, strong and hostile Washington?
