Vera later surmised that Putin’s St Petersburg “parents”, who were both in their 40s when Putin was born, and whose two older sons had died in childhood, had adopted her son. A year later, however, the boy’s grandfather took him to an orphanage.

When Vera married Giorgi Osepahvili, a Georgian soldier, with whom she had other children, he insisted that she abandon her first-born, so she sent him, aged nine, to live with her parents in Russia. “He loved Russian fables and Russian was his favourite subject,” she said. Local records are said to indicate that a Vladimir Putin was registered at a nearby school between 19 and in 2008 a local former teacher, Shura Gabinashvili claimed in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that she had given him Russian language lessons. She claimed that her son, nicknamed “Vova”, was born on Octo– exactly two years before Vladimir Putin’s official birth date – and she brought him up in the poverty-stricken Georgian village of Metekhi, an hour’s drive from the capital Tbilisi. She claimed that while studying agricultural mechanisation at university she fell in love with Platon Privalov, a mechanic, by whom she became pregnant, only to discover that her lover was already married and intended to steal the baby because his wife was unable to conceive. Vera Nikolaevna Putina was born on Septemin the Russian district of Ochyorsk. As a result the Kremlin was never able to refute Vera Putina’s claims conclusively. Both parents, he claimed, died of cancer in the late 1990s.īut independently verified details of his childhood have always been extraordinarily difficult to come by the primary source for most anecdotes is Putin himself. In his “quasi-autobiography” First Person, Putin wrote that he was born and brought up in St Petersburg, the sole surviving son of Maria, a menial worker, and Vladimir Putin, a factory worker and ex-serviceman who had served in Stalin’s secret police during the Second World War. Vera Putina, who has died aged 96, emerged from obscurity in 1999 claiming to be the biological mother of Vladimir Putin, whom she claimed to have abandoned when he was a child.

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