Maria Ivanovna died from cancer in the beginning of 1999. Right after his wife’s death Vladimir Spiridonovich began to have heart problems and a few months later he was hospitalized in the oncology department. Putin’s father died on august 2nd 1999. Both were buried in the “closed” Seraphimovskoe cemetery in Saint Petersburg. All of this is of an ill omen for the RF population. Despite cancer both died almost at ninety years old. People say that on his deathbed his father has said: “My son is like a tsar!” – meaning the prime minister’s suite, with which the son visited the father in the clinic. It can be ascertained that Putin comes from the bottom of society: his father is a turbulent metalworker, the mother, as it often happens, is a “saint” and a quiet woman (a housecleaner) living with a turbulent father. Both Putin’s parents were born in villages. For comparison: I am older than Putin by nine years, my parents for some reason turned out to be younger than Putin’s, both were born in small towns: my father in the city of Bobrov in the Voronezh region and my mother from the city of Sergach in the Gorkov region. Also they have a higher social status than Putin’s parents: my father graduated from a military college and became an officer and my mother managed to study two years in the chemistry department of a technical school. However my grandparents were indeed born in villages.
In school (№ 193) VVP’s study level was average. According to his school records he wasn’t noted for his good behavior. He was shy and taciturn. After seventh grade he started to study better, for example he showed interest in German. Putin started to practice martial arts from thirteen years old, as a 6th grade student of class “A” of School № 193. During this period he was sick a lot or missed school, either way, there were often notes in his absence records. According to some witnesses of Putin’s family life, VVP looks like his father who behaved as a very harsh person. (You get this kind of dismal workers, either they are harsh to the world or dissatisfied with themselves).
From 1960 to 1968 Putin attended School № 193 on Griboedov Canal in Leningrad. Griboedov Canal now has a bad fame partly because it is the place where the democrat Starovoytova was killed. Also it is on Griboedov Canal that my late wife, Natalya Medvedeva was born. She was the daughter of a nurse and a coastguard sailor. Apparently, to replace the Saint Petersburg natives extinct after the war, the capital’s downtown was populated with fresh, simple people – metalworkers and sailors. These were the processes of that time, in Putin’s biography I notice a lot of traits similar to mine. For instance, I started free style wrestling in seventh grade, at fourteen years old, but since I am older than Putin, this happened in 1957. Recently, my fellow-townsmen made a documentary about me in Kharkov, in it my old coach Arseny speaks very well of me – a promising teenage fighter. But from the general traits of a generation let us return to Putin. For some time he was the chairman of the detachment’s council. I was one for some years too until I left home at eleven years old.
After eighth grade Putin entered School № 281 on Sovetsky Street, with a specialization in chemistry. He graduated in 1970. Putin’s class teacher was Mina Moiseevna Yuditskaya (later she emigrated to Israel). Jewish teachers were a rule at that time and not an exception. My class teacher was Jacob Lvovich Kaprov. He didn’t go to Israel. VVP’s records show C marks for physics, chemistry and algebra. This again brings E. Limonov and V. Putin together. The teenager Savenko had C for these subjects and also a C for Russian literature, but an A for Ukrainian literature.
As it is to be expected, witnesses of Putin-student’s life affirm that he was reserved. “He liked to argue, including with teachers. He easily got into fights”. The fact that VVP is a reserved man, all of Russia sees it everyday from the television screen. His clenched jaws show his stubbornness and his behavior in crisis situations, for instance with hostage taking in the Nord Ost and Beslan confirms the opinion of his classmates. He “easily gets into fights”, too easily, because in his childhood he risked to get hit on the nose and in the case of Beslan his promptness to fight cost 311 lives, half of them children.
Another information from the past: It turns out that Putin liked to do political reports in school, reading out information from newspapers about currents events in the world. E. V. Savenko (Limonov) also liked to do political reports in class a few years before. In 1959, in January he passionately reported to his classmates about the bearded “barbudos” who captured Cuba’s capital – Havana. As students, Vladimir Vladimirovich and I resembled each other a certain time. It was an era. But after school we ceased to resemble each other. But farther about this.
Until 1990 the Putins lived near the Moscow train station in a communal apartment. This circumstance emphasizes the extreme poverty of the former metalworker and his wife, or did the communal apartment suit them? Since even if in 1928 by the moment of their marriage, VVP’s father and mother were twenty years old, they must have been born in 1908, meaning that in 1990 they were eighty-two years old. Living in a communal apartment at eighty-two years old! However in 1969 the family bought a house in Tosno near Saint Petersburg. They lived in this house in the summer and sometimes in the winter.
«CHILDREN WERE ALWAYS A BIT AFRAID OF HIM»
In 1970 V. V. Putin entered Leningrad’s State University on the law faculty. Ten years earlier in a hot august day E. V. Savenko came to the second exam in Kharkov’s State University. He was sitting on the windowsill in a white shirt, ate an apple and wondered looking at the fuss of the university entrants, at the nervous grimaces of their faces. They were clearly worried, afraid to be refused. E. V. Savenko didn’t understand why they were so worried. And thinking that he’ll have to spend the next five years in the company of these quiet scared young men and women whom he, a free provincial guy, did not respect, he got sad. And then he got up, carefully put his apple core on the windowsill and went down the stairs. At the same time rang the third bell calling to the exam. By October E. V. Savenko was working as a spider-man fitter in a construction trust: I erected a workshop building on Malishev’s factory, commonly it was called the tank factory because tanks were produced there.
You see, the period is the same, only nine years of difference. But the young men are different. One is a conformist, right after school he enters university, but by doing so he misses out life experience, only school and parents have formed him. The other drifts on life with pleasure, realizing that life is more important, never again undertakes attempts to enter a university, works on many Kharkov’s factories, among others on the famous even today for his strong union movement “Hammer and Sickle” factory in the 1963-1964, where he even takes part in a three-day strike. In result the end product is absolutely different. A dictator and his opponent, an opposing intellectual authority. Two years before the scene in Kharkov’s State University mentioned above, in 1958, in spring after reading the book “Alexander Blok’s youth poems” I got by accident, I started to write poetry and write them to this day.
But let us return to Putin, at that time still eighteen years old. Nikolay Kropachev, the dean of Saint Petersburg’s University remembers that Putin was studying on an individual plan. He studied without Cs, only Bs and As. Putin defended his diploma on the subject of “The principle of the most favorable nation in international law” and got an A, he passed state exams with an “excellent” distinction.
It is in Leningrad’s State University that Putin met a person who will later have an enormous influence on his life, Anatoly Sobchak. The famous democrat worked then as an assistant on the chair of economical law and later became a senior lecturer. According to some sources, Putin wrote one of his term papers on Sobchak’s course.