Strange and secret world Of young Vladimir Putin
Rare photos chart his chilling journey from treasured only child to cold-eyed KGB killer
FROM the sweet-faced five-year-old snuggling into his mother’s lap, to the doting young father, romping with his baby daughters at bathtime, these pictures show Vladimir Putin as we have never seen him before. The pitiless tyrant, willing to risk thousands of lives in his never-ending quest for power, was many decades away in the then distant future.
But youngVladimir was certainly raised to believe he was special… the golden only child born after the early deaths of two brothers he never knew. By the time he turns eight, a look of serious concentration has become his default expression. Sitting for his official class portrait – sporting an oversized winged collar and a short back and sides – his sullen demeanour glowers from the frame, as if life’s burdens are already bearing down on his young shoulders.
For decades, the details of Putin’s childhood have been shrouded in secrecy with approved information allowed to emerge only through official Russian channels.
Little more is known than at age 12, he began to practise judo, and he started at Saint Petersburg’s School No 193 when he was eight before moving to the city’s High School.
By the age of 14, the teenage judo champion’s wispy fair hair is worn with a surprisingly long, floppy fringe, but the serious, rather pained expression has further solidified into either a scowl or a smirk.
It is said that Putin wanted to be a secret agent for as long as he could remember.
Perhaps in these school photos he is already imagining a very different future from the hand-to-mouth existence of his parents, factory worker Maria and navy conscriptVladimir Snr. Or of the servile position of his grandfather Spiridon, a personal cook to Stalin and Lenin. To Maria and Vladimir,
‘Becoming a KGB spy, his life’s ambition, did little to improve Putin’s dark demeanour’
their third son’s birth on October 7, 1952 was nothing less than life-changing. Their firstborn Viktor died of diphtheria during the Second World War siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1941. Then second son Albert died in infancy. So their pride in their one surviving child, pictured as a young man perching beside them on a garden bench in 1985, is plain.
By then he was a KGB agent, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before leaving in 1991 to pursue a career in politics.
But if these rare photographs of him as a young man are any indication, the fulfilment of his boyhood ambition did little to improve his dark demeanour.
Even at his 1983 wedding to his wife Lyudmila there is barely a hint of a smile.
Only when playing with their two young daughters, Mariya and Yekaterina, now 36 and 37, or with the family dog, does he appear to relax, while the woman he divorced in 2014 mostly looks uncomfortable, nervous even.
These days, the all-powerful president seems to engender an atmosphere of barely controlled terror among those who have no choice but to engage with him.
But what is going through Putin’s head is impossible to determine from his frozen expression.
Perhaps the closest insight into his private emotions came when he quoted Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy at a press conference last year.
“There’s no happiness in life,” he said, “only a mirage of it on the horizon.”