Vera Putina claimed to be Vladimir Putin’s actual mom

AFTER SCRAPING flour from her fingers with a big, sharp knife, Vera Putina went by means of the images. A really small baby with a velvet cravat and good strap footwear. A boy geared up for winter, in a balaclava and scarf, and for summer season, with only a pair of shorts. A pupil within the again row on the Metekhi village college, the brightest in his class. All had the identical blond hair, weak chin and sulky backside lip; all had pale eyes, Russian eyes, like hers. Most additionally had the cautious, sidelong look of an sad baby. Sure, Vladimir Putin had been sad. And it was partly her fault. However there was no mistaking him when, in 1999, he left the shadows to turn into the president of Russia. What mom wouldn’t recognise her personal son? Moreover, he walked as he at all times had: like a duck.

The photographs have been solely copies now. Quickly after she made her declare, the KGB got here to her home, took the originals away and advised her to not speak. However this was essentially the most thrilling taking place within the village for years. Metekhi was a dirt-poor farming place on the foot of the Caucasus in Georgia, on the Kura river. The homes have been shoddy brick and patched cement, with rusty fences. The roads, although grandly named after Stalin, have been largely dust. Vera’s personal home was peeling in every single place, although she saved it good with lace curtains and had a bower of inexperienced vines for a backyard. She was Russian, not Georgian, however together with her hearty giggle and can-do perspective she was standard; and shortly everybody, even the boys plucking frogs out of the river, knew that Vera was the mom of “the king of Russia”.

She was 73 when she got here ahead, having seen him on her new tv on the information. Till then, she had saved quiet. However she was satisfied that Vladimir Putin, “Vova” as she known as him, was her misplaced, particular baby. He was the results of a school affair, a mad fling after a dance with one other scholar, Platon Privalov. When she later discovered Platon was married, she broke it off the subsequent day. However by then she was pregnant with Vova. She saved him for the second, and when she met Giorgi Osepashvili, a Georgian soldier, in Tashkent and married him, Vova was a part of the association.

The wedding lasted, nevertheless it didn’t go properly. They argued on a regular basis. Giorgi stated he had cash, however his dad and mom’ home in Metekhi, the place he took her, was a half-ruined hut. He made a peasant out of her. After which Vova set them combating. Not as a result of he was a nuisance; he preferred fishing and studying, particularly Russian fables, and did lovely calligraphy. True, he may get livid when he wrestled, refusing to lose, and he tormented the neighbours’ chickens along with his catapult, which she nonetheless saved. However he was largely a quiet boy. Giorgi by no means beat him, simply minimize him lifeless, and talked loudly of kicking the “bastard” out. Ultimately, when Vova was 9, Vera despatched him to her dad and mom. However they have been too ailing to deal with him, and despatched him to a army boarding college. After that she misplaced contact till she heard, by some means, that he was within the KGB.

This, after all, was not the origin-story Vladimir Putin advised. The president’s dad and mom got in his autobiography, “First Particular person”, as Vladimir Putin senior and Maria Putina, who lived in Leningrad. Through the siege of town in 1941-44 their two toddler sons died of hunger; Vladimir’s father discovered his mom laid out with the corpses, however rescued her. Vladimir was born in 1952, precisely two years after the day, October seventh, when Vova was born to Vera. That was the president’s story. Vera’s was that Vova needed to repeat first grade in his Leningrad college, as a result of his Russian was not ok; that accounted for the birth-year discrepancy. However Vladimir and Maria have been solely “foster-parents”.

That concept didn’t fly in Russia, the place the president ignored it and it appeared like Georgians making mischief. However past, and overseas, journalists have been intrigued. They famous that Mr Putin gave virtually no particulars of his childhood as much as the age of ten. It was seemingly, too, that he would disguise any Georgian connection, which made him half-foreign and invoked Stalin’s ghost. Some information stacked up: in 2008 the Every day Telegraph discovered {that a} Vladimir Putin had certainly attended Metekhi college for 3 years. Different occasions raised suspicions. In 2000 two journalists investigating Vera’s story, a Chechen and an Italian, have been killed in separate “accidents”. At one level strangers, two males and two girls, got here to Vera’s home and took blood for a DNA take a look at. She by no means heard the outcome.

For so long as she may, till her daughters stopped her, she saved the story going. In 2003, when she was 77, she opened her home and her coronary heart to a Dutch film-maker, Ineke Smits. In “Putin’s Mama” she confirmed the rigours of her life in Metekhi, which after 52 years she had by no means actually taken to. In Russia, she had sung and danced. Now, scarf tight on her head, boots laced on her legs, she trudged by means of mud, chopped firewood with a vigorous axe, fired piles of straw in an orchard, hoed the weeds from Giorgi’s railed-off grave. (“Hello, how’s issues?” she casually requested him.) She drank brilliant crimson native wine, filtering it previous her toothless gums.

As she laboured, she additionally mused about Vova. She questioned why the “foster dad and mom”, each of whom died within the Nineties, had by no means publicly talked of him. Presumably they too had been advised to not. Then once more, males who joined the KGB have been purported to neglect their households. Effectively, Vova had definitely forgotten her.

She had not forgotten him. There have been instances, particularly when he invaded Georgia in 2008, when she felt ashamed of him. However on the whole she felt extra ashamed of herself. She wished he would make only one go to to Metekhi, when she would inform him she was sorry for sending him away, and clarify that it wasn’t her fault. Typically she truly dreamed that Vova got here; however he by no means spoke to her, after which he could be known as away. She thought these desires occurred as a result of she lit candles for him in church.

When the KGB had come to take the photographs they left one behind. It confirmed a toddler of three in a brief belted tunic. His fringe barely cleared his eyes and his eyes have been gleaming, as if he had simply stopped crying. He was not immediately recognisable as Vladimir Putin, because the others had been. The entire set-up seemed a lot older. However what she recognised, Vera stated, was that gleam in his eyes. Plausibly or not, he was Russia’s ruthless president to her. ■