List of Plagiarism Controversies - Politics - Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of plagiarism by fellows at the Brookings Institution who allege that "arge chunks of Putin's economics dissertation on planning in the natural resources sector were lifted from a management text published by two University of Pittsburgh academics nearly 20 years earlier."

On 27 June 1997, at the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute Putin defended his Candidate of Science dissertation in economics titled "The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations". According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, sixteen of the twenty pages that open a key section of Putin's 218-page thesis 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 and translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s. Six diagrams and tables were also copied. Gaddy said "there's no question in my mind that this would be plagiarism", but nevertheless does not believe that the plagiarism was really intentional "in the sense that if you had wanted to hide where the text came from you wouldn't even list this work in the bibliography."

The dissertation committee disagreed with Gaddy's claims. Chairman of the committee Natalia Pashkevich, accused Gaddy of not reading the dissertation very well. "There are references to the article mentioned. Everything is done correctly... It is only a plus for Vladimir Putin that he used not only Russian authors, but foreign ones as well." Anatoly Suslov, provost of economics at the Mining Institute, who was present at Putin dissertation defense, recalled: "The opponent was someone from Moscow. The defense went calmly. There were many questions, of course, since it was a candidate's dissertation, but there was no question of plagiarism. No one uncovered anything of the kind. Vladimir Putin defended himself, and he prepared his own work. All those conversations about dissertations being bought are untrue. Ours isn't the kind of institute where you can do that." In his dissertation, and in a later article published in 1999, Putin advocated the idea of so-called National champions, a concept that would later become central to his political thinking.

Rector of the institute, Vladimir Litvinenko, who oversaw Putin's work, later received 5% of the stock of chemical company Phosagro. His share is now worth about $260,000,000.