Kathrine Frich
Even stories about the president’s late parents keep changing.
Famous leaders often spend years polishing their public image.
When someone holds total power, though, even simple family memories can turn into carefully guarded state secrets.
Now, a new biography reveals just how far one ruler goes to rewrite his own past.
Guarding the family secrets
Russian President Vladimir Putin routinely alters his own life story and hides his relatives from public view, according to Onet. In an excerpt from their book “The Tsar in Person” published by Paris Match, the authors explain how the Kremlin boss twists basic facts to keep total control over his image.
Before he rose to the top, his private life was far less secretive. His former wife, Lyudmila Shkrebneva, met him in 1980 before their eventual divorce in 2013, and the authors quote her early impression of him:
“Volodya was standing on the steps in front of the ticket office. He was dressed modestly, one might say poorly. He looked average: I wouldn’t have noticed him on the street.”
Old classmates told reporters that the young Putin struggled to impress women too. “We preferred more energetic boys,” former colleague Irina Podnosova recalled in the book.
Today, an unwritten Moscow rule bans reporting on his daughters, Maria and Katerina. Back in 2014, reporters looked into Katerina Tikhonova, who ran a multibillion-ruble rebuilding project at Moscow State University funded by Russian oligarchs despite having a fake name and no experience, yet nobody would officially confirm she was Putin’s child.
Rewriting his own parents
Even stories about the president’s late parents keep changing. When a 2015 article mixed up the dates and order of their deaths, Badanin and Rubin pointed to an obvious culprit: “Who could forget which one died first? No one, not even the president of the Russian Federation. We see only one explanation: it wasn’t Putin who wrote this text, but a Kremlin ghostwriter.”
His tales about the Siege of Leningrad shift as well, with one version claiming his father rescued his mother from medics and another saying she woke up among corpses. “Is Putin adapting the facts of his parents’ lives to suit political needs? That’s what it seems,” the authors write in Paris Match.
At a 2024 family event, Putin claimed his father Vladimir never drank or swore. Yet the authors note that his future father actually gouged out his mother Maria Ivanovna’s eye with a pitchfork when she was 17. By wiping out Putin’s real past and crushing the free press, Badanin and Rubin conclude, the Kremlin turned blatant state lies into official truth.
