- Vladimir Putin is born on October 7, 1952 in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad.
- He grows up as an only child and shares a one-room communal apartment with his parents on Baskov Lane in St. Petersburg. According to his authorized biography, they lived on the fifth floor of a rat-infested apartment building that had no elevator and no hot water. He begins school at age 8
- His mother, Maria Ivanovna, is said to have had less than a grade 5 education. She holds several jobs — including as a janitor and delivery person for a bakery. Putin’s father, Vladimir Spiridonovich, works as a toolmaker in a metal factory
- Putin is a devout Orthodox Christian and never takes off his baptismal cross that he had blessed at ‘the Lord’s Tomb’ in Jerusalem during his trip there in 1993
- In 2008 an 82-year-old Georgian woman from the village of Metekhi, named Vera Putina, steps forward with an astonishing story that makes headlines around the world. Putina claims that Vladimir Putin is her son and that she had given him away when he was 10 years old. Records state that a Vladimir Putin was registered at a Metekhi school from 1959-1960. Putina claims that Putin’s real father was a Russian mechanic named Platon Privalov, who got her pregnant while married to another woman. She says that when she eventually got married, her new husband gave her an ultimatum to give up her son. She turned her son over to her parents in December 1960 and believes that they then gave him up for adoption.
- Putin grew up watching spy movies. His favourite was The Sword and the Shield. He says he went to the KGB headquarters at age 16 to join up. They told him to come back once he was older and according to his biography, they recruited him while he was in his fourth year of university.
- Putin trains at the Andropov Red Banner Institute in Moscow.
- He is posted to Dresden, East Germany in 1986 where he works in Soviet intelligence operations till January 1990. In his biography Putin says, “We would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from Eastern Europe.”
- Putin meets his future wife, Lyudmila Shkrebneva, in a double date. She is a flight attendant from Kaliningrad and is in St. Petersburg for a three-day lay-over when they meet.
- They marry three years later, in 1983.
- The Putins have two daughters. Mariya ‘Masha’ is born in 1985 shortly before the Putins move to Germany. Yekaterina ‘Katya’ is born in Dresden in 1986.
- In 2011, documents from the archives of the BND, Germany’s spy agency, reveal that Putin’s wife had told a BND agent, posing as an interpreter for her, that her husband was a “wife beater and a philanderer” during their time in Germany. The German newspaper, Bild, reports, “This report gives added credibility to the rumour that when (Putin) left in his black Volga limousine in the spring of 1990, he allegedly left an illegitimate baby behind.”
- In Putin’s authorized biography, Lyudmila says about her husband, “I think beautiful women attract his attention.”
- June 6, 2013 – the couple announce they are divorcing, after years of rumours that they were living separately. The divorce is finalized in April 2014.
- September 2014 – Alina Kabayeva, the 2004 Olympic gold medal winner in rhythmic gymnastics, long rumoured to be Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend (a rumour the Kremlin denies) is appointed to run a major pro-Kremlin media group called The National Media Group. It owns 25% of Russia’s state controlled television station, Channel One, and the majority share in the daily newspaper Izvestia.
- Putin begins his political career with the Leningrad City Council in 1990, as an assistant to the then chair of City Council, later mayor, Anatoly Sobchak.
- In 1991 Sobchak creates the Committee for Foreign Liaison and makes Putin the head of it. He is responsible for any Western businesses opening in St. Petersburg. Allegations will later surface that Putin embezzled money during this period and laundered it abroad. An official investigation will be opened against him, led by City Councillor Marina Salye. She will eventually recommend the case be turned over to the prosecutor’s office. When asked about this in his biography, Putin says, “No, there wasn’t any real investigation. How could there be? There was no criminal offense.”
- In 1992 Putin helps to create SPAG, a company based in a suburb of Germany, and sits on their board of directors. In 2003, allegations will emerge against the company for being a front company for the Russian Tambov mafia group to launder money abroad.
- In 1996 Sobchak is defeated in the elections, following a year-long corruption investigation against him. He flees to Paris and Putin moves to Moscow. In August of that year he is hired as the deputy to the head of the president’s General Affairs Department.
- After this his career advances at “the speed of lightening” according to his wife — first in 1997 he is appointed as the head of the Main Control Directorate. On July 25, 1998, he is appointed as the head of the federal security service (FSB), the KGB’s successor spy agency.
- In June 1999, the state opens a criminal investigation, case number 144128, against Putin for large-scale embezzlement and money laundering while he was serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.
- In August 1999, then President Boris Yeltsin, appoints Putin as the Prime Minister.
- August 31, 1999 – The General Procuracy orders that case no. 144128, the embezzlement and money laundering investigation against Putin, be closed.
- Putin becomes popular among the Russian population after the September 1999 apartment bombings and speaking on television against the bombers. A vengeance-seeking Putin is televised making his infamous quote, “We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If they are in an airport, then, in an airport, and forgive me, if we catch them on the toilet, then we’ll rub them out in the crapper.”
- The Russian Public Opinion Center (VTsIOM) is monitoring polls and tracks the upward path of the public support for Putin as President. In August it is only 2%, by October it becomes 21% and by November it is 45%.
- December 31, 1999 – President Boris Yeltsin names Putin as Russia’s Acting President and appoints him as his chosen successor.
- Prior to the March 2000 presidential elections, Putin steps down from the board of directors of SPAG.
- March 26, 2000 – Putin, then the appointed acting president, is elected to office.
- May 13, 2000 – Putin signs his first decree and proposes a new set of bills, one of which replaces elected members of the upper house of parliament with appointed ones. On this same date German police raid 27 companies and apartments and confiscate documents related to SPAG in hopes of being able to track 16 million euros ($18.5 million U.S.). Prosecutors allege the money was laundered through foreign accounts in Finland and Liechtenstein by a leading Russian crime ring, the Tambov group. The target of the police investigation is the board of directors. Up until two months earlier, Putin had been one of those directors.
- June 2, 2000 – Then Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma is secretly recorded by his bodyguard, Major Mykola Melnychenko, speaking about the German raid of SPAG. In this conversation Kuchma says that his government had obtained copies of the German investigation and that Putin’s government was willing to pay money for it. In a later conversation a few days later, he is recorded saying that he had told Putin that he had turned the German investigation records over to the head of the FSB.
- March 14, 2004 – Putin is re-elected to a second term amid allegations of widespread electoral fraud.
- November 2006 – former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko dies from polonium-210 poisoning, something manufactured exclusively in Russia and requiring top level government clearance to access. In a letter written on his death bed, Litvinenko blames Putin for his murder. “You may be able to shut one man up, but the noise of protest all over the world will reverberate in your ears, Mr. Putin, to the end of your life. May god forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to my beloved Russia and her people.” Putin condemns the claim as politically motivated and denies any involvement.
- December 4, 2007 – then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice writes an internal cable stating that allegations of voter fraud during the 2004 Russian election had been brought to her attention. She writes that she has been told that, “Since Putin reportedly had secret assets tied up abroad (working through proxies like Chukhotka Governor and Oligarch Roman Abramovich), he worried that with a strong successor like Ivanov the tables could be turned on Putin, making him the object of law enforcement investigations and Interpol warnings.” And that the driving motivation for the electoral manipulation was for Putin to remain in power until he had assurances from his successor that he would receive immunity and not be prosecuted for his alleged illicit activities.
- Putin is constitutionally barred from running for a third term in 2008. However when Dmitry Medvedev, a former deputy prime minister and a friend of Putin’s from his hometown of St. Petersburg, wins the election he nominates Putin to be his prime minister.
- January 14, 2010 – according to a U.S. Spanish embassy cable, during a meeting, the Special Prosecutor for Corruption and Organized Crime, Jose Grinda Gonzalez, gives a detailed assessment of the activities of organized crime in Spain. He says he considers a lot of it to be imported from Russia and that he considers Russia a virtual ‘mafia’ state and can’t differentiate between the activities of the government and the Organized Crime groups. He also says he believes the late KGB agent Litvinenko’s claim that Vladimir Putin is implicated in the Russian mafia and controls its actions. Grinda declines to speak about this meeting when he meets with the CBC’s the fifth estate in August 2014.
- 2010 – Transparency International ranks Russia as more corrupt than 86 percent of the world.
- 2012 – When President Medvedev’s term expires, Putin steps forward to stand for the presidency.
- Tens of thousands of Russians protest in the streets in 2011 and 2012, claiming voter fraud on the part of the administration and suppression of freedom of speech and other democratic rights.
- At home, Putin introduces anti-gay legislation that spurs international condemnation. Many world leaders, including Barack Obama, boycott the Sochi Olympics.
- In February 2014 Russia begins to send unmarked troops and military equipment into Ukraine in what has been described as a stealth invasion.
- April 1, 2014 – NATO suspends all military and civilian cooperation with Russia. Many Western countries apply sanctions against Russian individuals and businesses. Putin admits that Russian troops had been active in Crimea.
- July 17, 2014 – near Donestsk, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is shot down over the conflict zone. All 298 on board are killed. The belief is that it was shot down by Russian-supported rebels. As a result, harsher economic sanctions are applied against Russia by Western countries, creating the most difficult year for Moscow’s relationship with the West since the Cold War.
- In 2014 Forbes magazine names Vladimir Putin the most powerful man in the world.
- December 31, 2014 – in his New Year’s eve message, a conciliatory Vladimir Putin invokes the memory of Russia allying itself with the West to fight Nazi Germany, stating that the upcoming 70th anniversary of the end of WWII was “a reminder of the responsibility of Russia and the United States in maintaining peace and international stability.” However Putin shows defiance over Crimea and praises its “return home” after Russian troops annexed it from Ukraine in March.
The Putin File – the fifth estate.
