Georgian woman said for decades that she was Putin’s real mother

Georgian villager Vera Putina insisted that she gave birth to a boy she called Vova who she later saw on TV as a leading KGB agent.

Vera Putina in 2008. Picture: Rustavi 2

Vladimir Putin’s is a life of lies. And it may be that a lie at the core of his being has changed world history.

Putin has been wary of his backstory, reportedly editing it when it suited the rising, ambitious KGB operator in the 1990s. His official biography claims he was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). But when she first saw Putin on television as a KGB officer, Vera Putina came forward with the compelling story that he was her son and had been born outside the city of Gori in eastern Georgia. She referred to him as “Vova”, a common nickname for boys named Vladimir.

She said she had fallen pregnant to Putin’s father, a Russian mechanic, unaware that he had a wife back home, and that her Vova had been born in 1950, making the Russian president 73 this year (he claims to be 70). Certainly, it is recorded that Putin’s father and his wife had had two boys earlier – Albert died in infancy, while Viktor, born in 1940, died two years later, probably of diphtheria, during the 872-day Siege of Leningrad.

A boy named Vladimir Putin was registered as attending a school in Metekhi in the 1959-60 year. His nationality was listed as Georgian.

“He went to school in Georgia until the third grade and then in Russia he repeated a couple of grades,” Vera told a reporter in 2017. She claimed that as a single mother she could not afford to raise Vova and sent him to his paternal grandmother in St Petersburg. That was at the end of 1960.

Putin has talked of his father’s war service: “I know more about my father’s family than about my mother’s. My father’s father was born in St Petersburg and worked as a cook. They were a very ordinary family.”

Putin’s grandfather was no ordinary cook; for a time he ran the kitchen for Vladimir Lenin at the revolutionary leader’s weekender on the outskirts of Moscow. On Lenin’s death he moved on as the cook at the dacha of Georgian-born Joseph Stalin.

A picture allegedly of Vladimir Putin with mother Maria Ivanovna Putina in July 1958 – two years before he was sent to family in Russia, according to Vera.

Putin has stated that his parents did not talk much about their lives: “People generally didn’t, back then.” On becoming president he said they had both died. By Putin’s account, the woman he claimed to be his mother had him when aged 41.

It was said among Putin’s secretive and untrustworthy colleagues in the KGB when he was stationed in East Germany that he changed his life story to improve his chances of promotion, airbrushing out his illegitimacy and Georgian nationality.

Perhaps in the 2000 national election that elevated him to the presidency, Putin, as a Georgian, might not have won; Soviet troops had brutally repressed an uprising there 11 years before.

When Vera’s claims were first aired, she said Russian officials visited her and urged her to stay silent on the issue.

With the flowering of glasnost (openness) during the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, young journalist Artyom Borovik made a name for himself on an irreverent and popular news show before working for the American CBS 60 Minutes as an investigative reporter. In compiling a report about Putin’s early years, he spoke to Vera about her claims. Before the program was completed, Borovik was killed in a plane accident.

Brave Italian journalist Antonio Russo, who had reported on hot spots in North Africa and was the only reporter on the ground when NATO bombed Kosovo in March 1999, was arranging to interview Vera in 2000 but was delayed by covering events in Chechnya. He was found dead in a Russian-controlled section of the country. He had been tortured and died of internal injuries. His flat was looted and his laptop stolen.

In 2008, a female Russian reporter posed a question to Putin while he relaxed on Sardinia with Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi: Was it true, as just reported in the newspaper Moskovsky Korrespondent, that Putin was divorcing his wife Lyudmila Putina to begin a relationship with young Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Alina Kabaeva?

Putin dismissed it as an “erotic fantasy”. In a disturbing scene, Berlusconi mimicked shooting the woman with a machinegun. Putin smiled. Moskovsky Korrespondent was shut down.

Putin doesn’t like being asked about his private life. His office dismissed Vera’s as a “crazy story”. The old woman offered to undertake a DNA test, but no one did (or would).

Kabaeva, reported to be Putin longstanding girlfriend, became a Russian politician, then stood down to chair a leading pro-Kremlin media conglomerate.

Vera Nikolaevna Putina. Claimed mother of Vladimir Putin.
Born Metekhi, Georgia, September 6, 1926; died Tbilisi, Georgia, last week, aged 96.