Early Life
Paul Klebnikov was born in New York to a family of Russian émigrés with a long military and political tradition: his great-great-great-grandfather Ivan Pouschine participated in the Decembrist revolt in 1825 and was exiled to Siberia, and his great-grandfather, an admiral in the White Russian fleet, was assassinated by Bolsheviks. As a child, he was known as a daredevil including swimming during hurricanes. He attended St. Bernard's School and Phillips Exeter Academy, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in political science in 1984. He then enrolled in the Officer Candidates School of the US Marine Corps as a way to test himself, but upon completing the course, declined to take the offered commission.
Instead, he pursued a PhD at the London School of Economics, where he would go on to win the Leonard Schapiro Prize "for excellence in Russian studies". Klebnikov wrote his doctoral thesis on Pyotr Stolypin, the reformist Tsarist prime minister. From 1987-88, he lectured at the Institute of European Studies in London.
On September 22, 1991, he married Helen "Musa" Train, the daughter of wealthy Wall Street banker John Train. The couple would go on to have three children.
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