Putin was accused of plagiarism

Russian President Vladimir Putin is accused of plagiarism. Large pieces of his candidate dissertation in economics are copied from the work of American economists, writes the British Sunday Times.

In 1997, Putin defended a dissertation at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute on the topic "Strategic planning for the reproduction of the mineral and raw base of the region in the conditions of the formation of market relations (St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region)."

The newspaper with reference to specialists from the Brucking Institute in Washington claims that Vladimir Putin has received a scientific degree for work, which is based on a simple translation of the work of two professors of Pittsburgh University. We are talking about the article by Strategic Planning and Policy ("Strategic Planning and Politics") William King and Devid Cliland, published in 1978.

According to the senior researcher of the Bruking Institute of Clifford Gaddy, 16 out of 20 pages of the key part of the Putin work were copied word for word or with minimal editing. In the early 90s, an American article was translated into a Russian institute related to the KGB, the newspaper writes.

On the eve of Washington Times reported that six schemes and tables from the Putin's dissertation are detected by a suspicious resemblance to American.

The newspaper notes that Russian apparathers often seek to acquire a prestigious scientific degree and hire the "blacks" who write them the text of the dissertation. In the United States, a similar scandal would instantly put a cross on a politician’s career, but in Russia no one perceives such accusations seriously.