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Cut-And-Paste Job: 'My Father Wrote Putin's Dissertation'
According to Russian records, Putin obtained a PhD. in Economic Science from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1996. Putin never attended the institute nor studied any facet of economics. After researchers obtained a previously inaccessible copy of the PhD. dissertation in 2005, it became clear that the PhD. dissertation was plagiarized from two sources.
Related: Putin's Thesis (Raw Text)
By Dmitry Volchek and Robert Coalson
March 07, 2018
Olga Litvinenko
Olga Litvinenko spent the summer of 1997 as a teenager at her father's dacha outside St. Petersburg. But it wasn't your usual summer of mushroom hunting and firing up the samovar. She says she spent the summer helping her father, Vladimir Litvinenko, the newly installed rector of the National Mineral Resources University, write a candidate's dissertation for a political up-and-comer, Vladimir Putin. Accusations that there was something fishy about Putin's dissertation are not new. A 2006 investigation by the Brookings Institution found strong evidence that most of the dissertation had been plagiarized from just two sources. Olga Litvinenko has been a harsh critic of Putin and of her father for several years. She lives in Poland and has charged that her father is keeping her 8-year-old daughter, Ester-Maria Litvinenko, unlawfully. For his part, Vladimir Litvinenko has filed a police report that Olga was kidnapped. In January, a St. Petersburg court annulled Olga's passport, a move she says her father arranged to prevent her from returning to Russia. Vladimir Litvinenko, who has been dubbed "the richest rector in Russia," became rector of the National Mineral Resources University (also called the St. Petersburg Mining University) in 1994.
"My father met Putin in 1991 though Gennady Belik, who was the head of the association of foreign-intelligence veterans," Olga Litvinenko says. "After he became rector, he used his official position and organized an illegal business preparing dissertations," Olga Litvinenko says of her father. Olga Litvinenko says an entire "criminal group" was formed that included professors, lecturers, and scientists tasked with producing the dissertations and pushing them through the defense process. "He wrote Putin's dissertation personally," she says of her father. "In 1997, they brought a copying machine to our dacha and my father took a vacation. Putin never came to the dacha. He never consulted with my father about his dissertation.... Everything was written exclusively by my father." At the time, Putin had already moved to Moscow and was working as deputy presidential chief of staff. "Maybe my father wrote it for him for free," Litvinenko says when asked if she knew how much Putin might have paid. "For one thing, he was [Putin's] man at the rector's post. They did business together and not just once. So I don't think you can talk about a particular payment. It is possible that it was a favor from my father for the help in getting the rector's post."
According to Russian records, Putin obtained a PhD. in Economic Science from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1996. Putin never attended the institute nor studied any facet of economics. After researchers obtained a previously inaccessible copy of the PhD. dissertation in 2005, it became clear that the PhD. dissertation was plagiarized from two sources.
Related: Putin's Thesis (Raw Text)
