Russian president Vladimir Putin even fakes his own family’s history

Like his myths about Ukraine, the Russian president’s distortions of his father’s war record are political propaganda.

Vladimir Putin parades in Moscow with a picture of his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin (inset).

On Victory Day, Russia’s annual celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany, Vladimir Putin carried aloft a portrait of his father in the uniform of a Soviet submariner. Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st Class. He died in 1999, shortly before his son became president.

Putin frequently tells stories of his father’s wartime heroism. Indeed, this personal link to Russia’s courageous self-sacrifice in World War II is one of the foundation stones of his popular appeal.

While Putin was parading in Moscow, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky was also giving an account of his family’s war. Zelensky’s grandfather, Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky, also fought in the Red Army on the Eastern Front, as did his great-grandfather.

Yet the wartime experiences of the Putin and Zelensky families were starkly different: Semyon’s three brothers, President Zelensky’s great-uncles, were murdered by the SS during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, along with 1.6 million other Ukrainian Jews. Putin’s preposterous claim to be “denazifying” Ukraine is aimed at ousting someone whose family experienced the full horror of the Nazi Holocaust.

The rival family histories recounted by the two warring presidents also differed in this respect: one was tragic and demonstrably true; the other, while heroic in form, had the unmistakable tang of propaganda, a tale told for political purposes.

According to Putin, his father joined a demolitions battalion of the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) and was dropped behind the lines in Kingisepp outside Leningrad. The Russian president claims his father’s unit blew up a munitions dump, hid out in a forest, and was then betrayed by local Estonians. Vladimir Spiridonovich supposedly evaded the pursuing Nazis by hiding in a swamp with the muddy water over his head: “He breathed through a hollow reed until the dogs had passed by.”

By his son’s account, Putin Senior then crossed back into Russian-held territory, one of only four men to survive from his unit of 28 men. Putin has also described how his injured father was carried across the frozen River Neva by a comrade in arms who “said goodbye, and went back to the front line”.

If this all sounds a little too good (and too filmic) to be credible, that is because it may be untrue, or at least heavily exaggerated and romanticised.

In 2012, at an economic summit in Vladivostok, Putin told another story to Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton when she was US Secretary of State meets with Vladimir Putin. Picture: Ria Novosti/AFP

The Russian leader described how, during the brutal German siege of Leningrad, his father had returned from the front lines to see “a pile of bodies stacked in the street” outside the family apartment - victims of starvation, cold and disease.

“As he drew nearer he saw a woman’s legs wearing shoes that he recognised as his wife’s . . . [he] took his wife in his arms and, after examining her, realised she was still alive. He carried her up to their apartment and nursed her back to health.” Vladimir was born eight years later.

This story is undermined by Putin’s own assertion, in a narrated autobiography, that his father was “in the battlefield the whole time” and “didn’t get a chance to look for” his wife in besieged Leningrad.

In another version, Putin’s mother was saved by neighbours who heard her groaning among the corpses. In another it is an uncle who saves her life. In yet another take on this malleable theme, Putin has described how his wounded father, recovering in hospital, secretly fed his food rations to his wife, saving her from starvation.

Such tales fit squarely with the Soviet wartime themes of self-sacrifice, heroism and resilience, celebrated every year on Victory Day.

The only firm claim to distinction in the Putin family tree is gastronomic: his paternal grandfather Spiridon was the personal chef to both Lenin and Stalin, but the grandson is far more proud of his father’s service on the battlefield than his grandfather’s work in the kitchen.

The truth about Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin’s war is probably more prosaic, or perhaps much more sinister. He certainly joined the submarine fleet in 1932 at the age of 21 and left in 1937. That was the year Stalin’s Great Purge reached its height, in which the NKVD murdered up to 1.2 million suspected traitors, most of whom were completely innocent. In the war, the NKVD was responsible for enforcing ideological conformity and executing Soviet soldiers who showed signs of wavering.

If Putin’s father was in the NKVD between 1937 and 1942 (when he was back in the regular army and severely wounded) then he may have had a great deal of blood on his hands. But there is no hard evidence that Vladimir Spiridonovich was really in the NKVD. My suspicion is that Putin invented the tale of the heroic spy-saboteur to fit in with his own backstory as a KGB colonel.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a military parade on Victory Day, claims a personal link to Russia’s courageous self-sacrifice in World War II.

War stories tend to be embroidered down the generations. Putin grew up on Soviet tales of wartime derring-do. Old soldiers sometimes exaggerate, their tales elevated into family myth.

Putin’s implausible family war legends are significant because they fit with his wider appropriation of history: the invasion of Ukraine has been justified by the Kremlin with a version of the past that is manifestly false. Russia’s president appears to have distorted his own family history in a similar way.

Contrast that with Zelensky’s unvarnished telling of a wartime story, as he puts it, “about a family of four brothers”.

“Three of them, their parents and their families became victims of the Holocaust. All of them were shot by German occupiers who invaded Ukraine,” he said. “The fourth brother survived. Two years after the war, he had a son, and in 31 years, he had a grandson. In 40 more years, that grandson became president.”

This is a story, horrific and unquestionably real, that requires no embellishment.

The Times