MR. PUTIN
Monday, January 26, 2026 11:43AM
Early life and education
Putin was born on 7 October 1952 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia),[21] the youngest of three children of Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Putina (née Shelomova). His grandfather, Spiridon Putin, was a personal cook to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.[22][23] Putin's birth was preceded by the deaths of two brothers: Albert, born in the 1930s, died in infancy, and Viktor, born in 1940, died of diphtheria and starvation in 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany's forces in World War II.[24][25]
Putin's mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. During the early stage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD.[26][27][28] Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942.[29] Putin's maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of the Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.[30]
Education
Putin c. 1960
On 1 September 1960, Putin started at School No. 193 at Baskov Lane, near his home. He was one of a few in his class of about 45 pupils who were not yet members of the Young Pioneer (Komsomol) organization. At the age of 12, he began to practice sambo and judo.[31] In his free time, he enjoyed reading the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Lenin.[32] Putin attended Saint Petersburg High School 281 with a German language immersion program.[33] He is fluent in German and has given speeches and interviews in that language.[34]
Putin studied law at the Leningrad State University named after Andrei Zhdanov (now Saint Petersburg State University) in 1970 and graduated in 1975.[35] His thesis was on "The Most Favored Nation Trading Principle in International Law."[36] While there, he was required to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); he remained a member until it ceased to exist in 1991.[37] Putin also met Anatoly Sobchak, an assistant professor who taught business law,[h] who later became the co-author of the Russian constitution. Putin was influential in Sobchak's career in Saint Petersburg, and Sobchak was influential in Putin's career in Moscow.[38]
In 1997, Putin received a degree in economics (Candidate of Economic Sciences) at the Saint Petersburg Mining University for a thesis on energy dependencies and their instrumentalisation in foreign policy.[39][40] His supervisor was Vladimir Litvinenko, who in 2000 and again in 2004 managed his presidential election campaigns in St Petersburg.[41] Igor Danchenko and Clifford Gaddy consider Putin to be a plagiarist according to Western standards. One book from which he copied entire paragraphs is the Russian-language edition of King and Cleland's* Strategic Planning and Policy* (1978).[41] Balzer wrote on the Putin thesis and Russian energy policy and concludes along with Olcott that "The primacy of the Russian state in the country's energy sector is non-negotiable", and cites the insistence on majority Russian ownership of any joint-venture, particularly since BASF signed the Gazprom Nord Stream-Yuzhno-Russkoye deal in 2004 with a 49–51 structure, as opposed to the older 50–50 split of BP's TNK-BP project.[42]
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Monday, January 26, 2026 11:52AM