loading…
Vera Nikolaevna Putina, a Georgian woman who died last Wednesday at the age of 96, claimed she was the biological mother of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo/Kate Weinberg
TBILISI – Vera Putina, who died at the age of 96 on Wednesday (31/5/2023), came under the media spotlight in 1999 when she claimed to be the biological mother of the President of Russia Vladimir Putin The Georgian woman claims the Kremlin leader is the son she left behind when she was a child.
In his “quasi-autobiography” First Person, Putin writes that he was born and raised in St Petersburg, the only surviving son of Maria, a manual laborer, and Vladimir Putin, a factory worker and former soldier who had served in the secret police. the Stalin era during World War II. Both of his parents, according to Putin, died of cancer in the late 1990s.
But independently verified details of his childhood have always been extremely hard to come by – the main source for most anecdotes is Putin himself. As a result the Kremlin has never been able to conclusively refute Vera Putina’s claims.
Vera Nikolaevna Putina was born on September 6, 1926 in the Ochyorsk district, Russia. She claims that while studying agricultural mechanization at university she fell in love with Platon Privalov, a mechanic, with whom she became pregnant, only to discover that his lover was married and intended to steal her baby because his wife was unable to conceive.
She claims that her son, nicknamed “Vova”, was born on October 7, 1950—exactly two years before Vladimir Putin’s official birth date—and that he raised him in the impoverished Georgian village of Metekhi, an hour’s drive from the Georgian capital; Tbilisi.
Local records show that one Vladimir Putin was enrolled in a nearby school between 1959 and 1960 and in 2008 a former local teacher, Shura Gabinashvili, claimed in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that he had given him Russian lessons.
“He loved Russian fairy tales and the Russian language was his favorite subject,” he said. “He also likes fishing and wrestling.”
When Vera married Giorgi Osepahvili, a Georgian soldier, with whom she had another child, Giorgi insisted that Vera leave her firstborn. So Vera sent him, then nine years old, to live with his parents in Russia.
However, a year later, the boy’s grandfather took him to an orphanage.
