Daughter of the rector of Russian university says her father prepared Putin's thesis
The rector of the St. Petersburg Mining University, Vladimir Litvinenko, personally wrote a thesis for Russian President, Vladimir Putin, as indicated by his daughter, Olga Litvinenko, Radio Liberty reports.
"One of Vladimir Putin’s secrets, which Olga Litvinenko knows very well, is how he [Putin] defended his Ph.D. thesis," the publication writes.
He defended his thesis in 1997 at the St. Petersburg Mining University, now a university headed by Vladimir Litvinenko. At that time, Putin already worked in Moscow and served as the Deputy Head of the Department of the Affairs of the Russian President.
According to Olga, her father, after becoming rector in 1994, "organized an illegal business - making theses." Scientific papers were written by a group of professors and teachers from the university. In addition, they ensured that the preliminary defense and defense for those who bought the theses was successful.
"After that father made sure that it passed through the Higher Attestation Committee," Litvinenko added.
"And he personally wrote the thesis for Putin. In the summer of 1997, a Xerox machine was brought to our dacha, and my father took a leave of absence from work." Putin never appeared at our dacha, never consulted my father about the thesis, that is, it wasn’t done in the usual way where the graduate student comes to the professor to say I have questions, let's discuss, rewrite, etc. No, there was absolutely no such thing here, my father wrote all of it exclusively by himself," Litvinenko said.
She believes that Litvinenko wrote a thesis for Putin free of charge in gratitude "for his help in obtaining the position of rector." In addition, they had a joint business.
In 2006, researchers at the Brookings Institution in Washington found the thesis by Vladimir Putin entitled "Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Mineral Resource Base of a Region under Conditions of the Formation of Market Relations" to be plagiarized.
16 of the 20 pages containing the key part of Putin's work were either copied or rewritten with minimal changes from the book, Strategic Planning and Policy, written by University of Pittsburgh professors, William King and David Cleland, published in 1979, and translated into Russian in 1982.
Six diagrams and graphs from Putin's work almost completely coincide with the American ones.
Litvinenko headed Putin's election campaign in 2000, 2004, and 2012. This year he became one of the co-chairmen of the campaign headquarters.
In 2017, he was ranked 122nd in the listing of the 200 richest businessmen in Russia according to Forbes.