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Happy 74th Birthday to Dear, Respected and Honorable President Vladimir Putin, Sir
VLADIMIR PUTIN — A LIFE IN TIME
7 October 1952 — 7 October 2026
CHAPTER 1
7 OCTOBER 1952 — THE BEGINNING
Leningrad, Soviet Union
On 7 October 1952, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad, then part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union.
He was born into a modest working family in a city whose recent history had been extraordinarily painful.
Only seven years had passed since the end of the Second World War. Leningrad had endured the devastating German siege, and the war remained part of the living memory of the city's population.
Putin later described his family as a simple family and emphasized the influence of the wartime experiences of his parents and relatives. He said his father had fought in the Great Patriotic War and that his mother had lived through the siege of Leningrad with a child. He also described family, school, literature and the wider social environment as influences that helped form his worldview.
Those statements are important, but they are Putin's retrospective account of his own upbringing. In this diary, that distinction is preserved.
A FAMILY MARKED BY WAR
Putin's father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, was a Soviet serviceman who served in the Navy and later fought during the Second World War. His mother, Maria Ivanovna, lived through the siege of Leningrad.
The family into which Vladimir Putin was born therefore carried direct memories of a war that had ended less than a decade earlier.
There is something historically striking here.
The man who would eventually become the leader of Russia was born not into the Russia of the twenty-first century, but into Stalin's Soviet Union.
When he was born:
- Joseph Stalin was still alive.
- The Soviet Union was already one of the world's two principal superpowers.
- The Cold War was already reshaping international relations.
- The Korean War was still being fought.
- Leningrad was still recovering from the enormous human losses of the Second World War.
The political world into which he was born would disappear before he reached forty.
The country of his childhood would disappear too.
THE CITY
Leningrad was not merely the place where Putin happened to be born.
It was the city in which his childhood unfolded.
The city's name itself carries a remarkable historical trajectory:
St Petersburg → Petrograd → Leningrad → St Petersburg
Putin was born during the Leningrad period.
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