the mysterious president who revived Russia

Writing about a person about whom everything is said is not easy at all. Politician, world leader, president of Russia and its former prime minister, intelligence officer, athlete, hunter, dog lover … It seems that everything is known about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who will turn 69 on October 7, but certainly has no intention of retiring, write from Labor.

On the contrary, amendments to the Russian constitution adopted on July 1, 2020, allow him to run for two more presidential terms in 2024 in 2024. Thus, he can rule the country until 2036, when he will be 84, and will be the longest-serving president, either as president or prime minister – since 1999, when he took the place of Boris Yeltsin. With his spartan lifestyle and iron health, this is entirely possible.

As around any celebrity, so around Vladimir Putin is a web of rumors, conspiracies, mystifications, which seem so convincing that, in the end, one begins to wonder if he is what he pretends to be or not.

The son of two mothers?

Vladimir Vladimirovich was born on October 7, 1952 in Leningrad, today St. Petersburg. His paternal roots are from the Tver region, at some point in the 18th century his great-grandfathers settled in the village of Pominovo, where the family house is still located. Putin’s grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovich, moved to St. Petersburg, where he studied cooking and was appointed to the party commissioner’s dining room after World War I. He cooks for Lenin and Stalin, and his grandson remembers him because he was 13 when his grandfather died.

Spiridon Ivanovich has four children, one of whom is Vladimir, born in 1911 – the father of the future statesman. He served in the army as a submariner, then returned to his native Pominovo and married Maria Shelomova. Their son Albert was born, with whom they moved to St. Petersburg. There they had another son – Victor. Albert died before World War II.

The father works in a military factory and is not mobilized, but voluntarily goes to the front. He was sent to a NKVD sabotage detachment, which was ambushed almost immediately. Of the 28 people, only four survive, and one is Putin’s father. While the German soldiers chase him, he stands, immersed in a swamp and breathing through a hollow reed. All the while he hears their footsteps close to him and barks at the dogs.

The surviving soldier was sent to the active army – on the Leningrad front. There he was severely wounded and for the rest of his life he carried fragments in one of his legs. While in the hospital, he gives his entire ration to his wife so that she can feed 3-year-old Victor. Unfortunately, the child was taken, along with others, to “save from starvation”, but fell ill with diphtheria and died.

Putin’s mother miraculously survived the blockade. Her husband, returning home from the hospital, sees corpses being removed from the building. Among them is Maria. It seems to him that she is breathing. She throws crutches at the paramedics and forces them to take her back to the apartment. He took care of her again and miraculously – when she was 41 years old, she became pregnant and in 1952 Vladimir was born. His parents did not live to see him at the head of the state – his father died at the end of 1998 and his mother – in 1999, but they witnessed his successful political career.

On the eve of the 2000 presidential election, Georgian newspapers made the sensational claim that presidential candidate Putin had Georgian roots, was adopted, and his mother lived in a suburb of Tbilisi. A huge number of foreign correspondents are looking for “Putin’s mother” for an interview. Greek and German television companies are making a film about her life, but it is banned from broadcasting in Russia. The book “The Secret Biography of the President of Russia” was published, which turned out to be sponsored by Chechens. Despite the hype surrounding the “biological mother,” Putin is winning the presidential election.

Vera Nikolaevna Putina herself is convinced that the president is her Vova, whom she gave birth to in 1950 without marriage, as it turns out that his father Platon Privalov was married. She gives the child her own surname. He left it with his parents in the Perm region and went on an undergraduate internship in Tashkent. There he met the Georgian Georgi Osipashvili, married him and moved with Vova to Georgia. When more children appeared in the family, the money was not enough and the 9-year-old boy was sent to his grandparents in the Urals. Without his mother’s knowledge, his grandfather sent him to a boarding school in Perm, where Volodya was adopted.

When she sees him on television, Vera Putina decides that this is her son. However, in the archives of the Perm orphanage there are documents about the graduation of Vladimir Platonovich Putin and his admission to a technical university in 1968. After graduating, the young man was appointed assistant drill. His colleagues claim that this is a completely different person who went to work in the north in the late 1980s. At that time, the future president was already a KGB officer and from 1985 to 1990 he worked in the former GDR.

Family away from the spotlight

The other big hoax has to do with Vladimir Putin’s personal life. He hardly spoke about him, except for the admission that he had two daughters from his marriage to Lyudmila Putina – Maria, born in April 1985 in Leningrad, and Katerina – in August 1986, in Dresden.

Ludmila, whom he married in the summer of 1983, is a linguist and former flight attendant. They divorced in 2014. “In practice, we never saw each other. “Everyone led their own lives,” Putin said of their separation. There are rumors that the president has sent his wife to a convent, but this is not true. Ludmila finds a new man in her life, who is 20 years younger than her – businessman Arthur Ocheretny. They married in 2015. The two live in a luxury villa near Biarritz in southwestern France.

Putin’s two daughters are not present in public, and there are no published photos of the family from later years. Since they lived in the GDR, the girls knew German and were supposed to have graduated from a foreign language high school and then the University of St. Petersburg under foreign names. In 2017, the president of Russia said that he had two grandchildren and that one went to kindergarten and the other was recently born.

In 2013, Katerina, named Tikhonova, married billionaire Kiril Shamalov, the son of a close friend of Putin’s. In 2018, the two divorced, and her husband ceased to be an economic adviser to the Kremlin. Katerina is the director of the high-tech project Innopraktika, an incubator for startups with a solid budget. She is passionate about acrobatic rock, a contestant and vice president of the World Rock and Roll Confederation.

Her older sister Maria Vorontsova bears the surname of her Dutch husband Faassen. There is almost no information about her in the media, except that she studied biology at the Medical Faculty of the University of St. Petersburg and then medicine in Moscow and works in the field of biomedicine as an endocrinologist. It is likely that she is Putin’s daughter, who tested the Russian vaccine against Kovid-19 on herself – something the president announced at the beginning of the epidemic.

An international economic forum was held in St. Petersburg in June this year, attracting attention not so much with the participation of the Russian president as with the appearance of two interesting speakers. One was the head of the Center for National Intellectual Reserve at Moscow State University, Katerina Tikhonova, and the other was geneticist Maria Vorontsova. The first spoke in a 6-minute video about the use of innovative technologies to increase investment, and the second gave a 13-minute interview on rare diseases, which was broadcast nationally.

So far, both the Kremlin and the president himself have refused to confirm that these are his daughters, but analysts predict that the appearance of the two young ladies is a harbinger of their future more serious involvement in the country’s political life.

Speculation with illegitimate children

According to the Russian website Proekt, the Russian president has another daughter, born of an extramarital affair with a woman named Svetlana Krivonogih in 2003 – Elizabeth. Not much is known about Svetlana, except that she is rich – her fortune amounts to about 100 million dollars.

It has a stake in the promising St. Petersburg bank Rossiya since 2000, when investments from Gazprom flowed into the vault. He has a shareholding in an elite ski resort in the St. Petersburg region and in other joint-stock companies, as well as appetizing properties in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Sochi, which are not sold to random people.

She is only said to be “close to Putin,” and her rise is probably due to his influence. By the way, he personally attended the opening of the resort, in which she has a stake, and claims that this is one of his favorite places for skiing, hunting and horseback riding. The two met in the 1990s and were spotted in adjacent seats on the same plane in 1999, when he was still head of the FSB security service.

According to the “Project” website, Svetlana’s emergence from nothing (she is the daughter of a cleaner and an alcoholic) is due to the fact that in 2003 she secretly gave birth to Putin’s daughter. At the time, he was working on his re-election for a second term as president and was touring the country with his wife, Ludmila. News of an illegitimate child would not contribute to his image, no matter how broad-minded the Russians may be.

The Center for Visual Analysis at the University of Bradford, UK, is conducting computer experiments and proves more than 70 percent similarity between photos from Elizabeth’s social networks and those of the president. After the site searched for Svetlana Krivonogih for more details, the photos of her daughter disappeared from the web.

Two more illegitimate children, twin boys, are attributed to Vladimir Vladimirovich. According to gossip media, they were born in 2019 to former world and Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion and United Russia Duma MP Alina Kabayeva, the current director of the state-run National Media Group.

Of course, in this case there is no evidence. Rumors that Kabayeva gave birth to Putin have been circulating since 2008 and are renewed periodically. She herself does not speak on the matter.

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