USA TODAY International Edition
What you might not know about Russian President Putin
Tough, wealthy former KGB spy has shady history
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s longestserving leader since Josef Stalin, seeks a fourth term as president in this Sunday’s election.
Putin is a former KGB spy who holds a Ph.D. in economics and has a judo black belt. His tough-guy image is well known because he invited government photographers along as he rode on horseback shirtless, treated a tranquilized tiger and a polar bear, and flew in an ultralight with migratory birds. But here are a few things you might not know:
Putin is fabulously wealthy
According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, Putin earned $860,000 between 2011 and 2016. But estimates of his net worth range from $40 billion to $200 billion. The latter figure would make Putin nearly twice as wealthy as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person.
How did it happen? As a KGB spy during the Soviet era, Putin maintained ties to organized crime, according to Karen Dawisha, author of Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? As president, he steers government contracts and the sale of state-owned enterprises to businessmen who support his rule and present him with valuable gifts, Dawisha wrote in 2014.
Judo schtick might be just that
Putin has practiced some form of martial arts since he was 14, first with a Russian form called sambo and then with judo, according to his official biography and interviews. He told NPR in 2001 that he considered the sport a type of philosophy that he has practiced his entire adult life.
Legal analyst Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare blog says that while there are lots of photos of Putin warming up and throwing opponents, they seem to be willing participants.
“Putin is fraud martial artist,” Wittes wrote on Facebook. “He only fights people who are in his power, and they are all taking falls for him.”
His dissertation was plagiarized
Putin in 1996 earned a post-graduate degree that is a rough equivalent of a Ph.D. at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, though he never attended that school, according to a 2006 presentation by analysts Igor Danchenko and Clifford Gaddy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
His dissertation was on the investment in large-scale natural resource extraction, like oil and gas, to “restore Russia’s great power status.”
Pages of it were largely copied from a 1982 American business school textbook called Strategic Planning and Policy, Gaddy said.
Dark stories surround his rise
As prime minister in 1999, Putin was alleged to have been behind a string of apartment bombings that killed 300 residents and were officially blamed on Chechen separatists, according to Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer and whistle-blower who fled to Britain. Putin denied the allegations, which Litvinenko wrote in the 2001 book Blowing
Up Russia. The bombings provided the rationale for a military campaign in Chechnya that coincided with Putin’s first run for the presidency.
Putin’s war in Chechnya employed a scorched-earth policy that left thousands of Chechens dead. Human rights violations were exposed by Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya.
Critics come to bad ends
Politkovskaya was shot to death at the entrance to her apartment building in Moscow in October 2006. Litvinenko was poisoned to death in London with a rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210, the next month. At least three other people who investigated or worked to expose their findings about the apartment bombings were murdered. And opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot to death in 2015.
Family life
Putin married his first wife, flight attendant Lyudmila, in 1983, while he worked for the KGB. They had two daughters. Mariya, 32, studied medicine and has a Ph.D. in dwarfism. She was last known to be living in the Netherlands. Katerina, 31, is a competitive rock ’n’ roll dancer and heads the Zhavoronki Acrobatic Rock’n’Roll Center, the world’s only facility dedicated to the sport, according to Reuters.
Putin divorced his wife in 2013. His rumored girlfriend, gymnastics gold medalist Alina Kabaeva, 34, was photographed in 2015 wearing a wedding ring, according to British tabloids.