Translated material
Putin helped 24 relatives get government-related positions
Vladimir Putin helped at least 24 of his relatives get government-related positions. The Project found this out while working on the Fathers and Grandfathers project, the largest study of nepotism in Russia (we will be publishing its results all next week, starting on Monday). This is probably a record figure for Russian rulers over the past 100 years.
Details . State-related income was received by the families of all four of Putin’s famous lovers (Lyudmila Putina-Ocheretnaya, Alina Kabaeva, Svetlana Krivonogikh and Alisa Kharcheva ), both “official” daughters - Maria and Katerina, paternal cousins Evgeniy and Igor, maternal cousin Lyubov Shelomova and paternal cousin Lyubov Kruglova.
- ️ For a complete list of the president’s relatives in government-related positions, see the chart accompanying this article.
- ️ Putin’s relatives receive different positions. The most senior posts went to a branch of Yevgeny Putin's cousin. Its representatives Anna Tsivileva, Sergei Tsivilev and Mikhail Putin received posts in the government and Gazprom.
- ️ The paternal cousin’s branch controls another state-owned company - the president’s nephew Viktor Khmarin heads RusHydro.
- ️ One of the president’s sons-in-law, Igor Zelensky (Katerina Tikhonova’s common-law husband), oversaw the construction of the theater in Sevastopol, and Kharcheva’s father, Vsevolod Kharchev, is content with a modest position in the propaganda ANO “Dialogue”.
Other rulers. For a long time, the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was associated with nepotism - journalists in power called his relatives “family.” However, even in a broad sense, no more than five relatives of the then head of state can be associated with power.
- ️ Soviet leaders also appointed relatives to important positions. Vladimir Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya was deputy people's commissar of education. Several other relatives who occupied not so high positions also came to power.
- ️ Joseph Stalin’s son Vasily commanded the capital’s Air Force, Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law Alexei Adzhubey was the editor-in-chief of Izvestia and a member of the CPSU Central Committee, Leonid Brezhnev’s son was the first deputy minister of foreign trade, and his son-in-law was the first deputy head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the son of Yuri Andropov was a prominent diplomat, and the son of Konstantin Chernenko managed to grow only to the deputy head of the department Goskino. Some other relatives of the leaders of the USSR also received positions related to power, but not on Putin’s scale.
"Fathers and Grandfathers." The Project's study on nepotism in Russia will be published throughout the next week, starting on Monday. In its preparation, we studied the biographies of more than 1,300 senior government officials and more than eight thousand of their relatives and in-laws.