Putin, Vladimir 1952 -- (普金)
President of Russia. Born Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad (later St. Petersburg), Russia. An only child, Putin grew up living with his mother and father, a factory foreman and World War II veteran, in a communal apartment with several other families. As a young boy, he began studying martial arts, and by age 16 had become an expert at sambo, a Russian combination of judo and wrestling. Around that same time, Putin was selected to attend Leningrad School No. 281, a college-preparatory school for the city best students. In 1970, he enrolled at the prestigious Leningrad State University, where he majored in civil law and continued his study of martial arts. He was Leningrad judo champion in 1974, and a year later graduated with honors from the university.
Upon his graduation, Putin was recruited by the KGB, the Soviet Union notorious national security organization, then led by Yuri Andropov, a notorious disciplinarian and later briefly the leader of the Soviet Union in 1983. After studying espionage and foreign intelligence in Moscow, where he learned German and earned a black belt in judo, Putin began working in counterintelligence, then joined the KGB First Directorate as a foreign intelligence agent.
In 1985, the KGB sent Putin to East Germany, where he lived in Dresden under a false name and with a cover-up job as the head of a so-called German-Soviet friendship society. The exact nature of his real work there is still a matter of some debate; his main duties certainly included spying on member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), recruiting informers and agents, and collecting and analyzing data to send to Moscow. During his time in the divided Germany, Putin was exposed to a number of Western ideas, both economic and political, that would play a pivotal role in his post-KGB career.
With the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev and his erestroika ? and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe during the latter half of the 1980s, Putin work in East Germany was precipitously drawing to a close. He returned to Russia in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, as a decorated KGB agent. The agency rewarded him with an administrative post at his alma mater, Leningrad State University, that was largely a cover for him to continue intelligence work.
Shortly thereafter, Putin encountered his old law professor, Anatoly Sobchak, who by then had become chairman of the city council and one of Russia leading democrats. Drawn by the lure of politics, Putin left the KGB to become one of Sobchak key aides. After Sobchak won election as the first mayor of the newly renamed city of St. Petersburg in 1991, Putin was named deputy mayor in his administration. In addition to overseeing the daily operations of St. Petersburg, Putin was primarily responsible for opening the city to a good deal of foreign investment, including corporate giants such as Credit Lyonnais, Coca-Cola, and the Japanese electronics company NEC.
In 1996, Sobchak lost his reelection campaign; Putin subsequently resigned from the city government out of loyalty to his old teacher. Although Sobchak was charged with official corruption after leaving office, Putin remained virtually untouched by the allegations. He was offered a Kremlin post in 1997, as the deputy to Pavel Borodin, the head of the powerful Kremlin property department in Moscow.
The former KGB agent rise in the ranks of power in the Kremlin was swift and dramatic: in 1998, then-President Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin as chief of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB. In August 1999, as conflict in the southwestern Russian republic of Chechnya began to heat up, Yeltsin named the 47-year old Putin as prime minister (the latest in a string that Yeltsin had appointed to that office).
