Why Russia’s Strongman Putin Could Never Work For The Washington Post

Pssst! Hey, you…Vladimir Putin. Here’s a hint. Don’t apply for the sudden opening at the Washington Post for a blogger:

THE career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.

Putin was labelled a plagiarist yesterday after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the Russian president’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in-part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978.

According to the Kremlin’s official biography, Putin, 53, obtained a PhD in economics from the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997. But the US researchers also established that his thesis was for a lesser degree that would not have entitled him to a full doctorate.

The embarrassing revelation that Putin, a former KGB agent, may have cheated and lied about his qualifications follows a long search by US scholars for evidence of the president’s academic prowess. A copy of the thesis was eventually located in the electronic files of a Moscow technical library.

According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Putin’s work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, written by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s.

Youthful indiscretions, we’re sure. (Will he resign from his post as Russia’s President? Will the Easter Bunny visit my house?)