The latest biography of President Vladimir Putin has hit the shelves, complete with resounding praise for the president and a family tree dating back to Peter the Great. But its author told reporters Monday that he had come under no pressure from the Kremlin -- either to write the book or to show his manuscripts -- and was driven by his own inquisitive nature.
Journalist Oleg Blotsky, whose book "Vladimir Putin: A Life Story" was released last week, said the impetus for his project came in July 2000 during a visit to Berlin when German acquaintances spent an evening grilling him on "Who is Mr. Putin?" -- and he had nothing to tell them.
"That was the decisive moment. I began trying to find out the answer for myself," said Blotsky, who first earned press attention in February 2000 after Russian television aired a controversial videotape of mass graves in Chechnya, which a German reporter had bought from Blotsky and claimed as his own.
Blotsky, who approached Putin through his aide and top spokesman on Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, said the president had been reluctant to talk about himself, saying that everything about him was already public knowledge.
But Blotsky managed to convince him otherwise, in part by unearthing biographical details the president himself did not know: During the course of his background research, Blotsky discovered that Putin's father had not only been a Stakhanovite lathe operator at the Leningrad factory where he worked, but a renegade journalist, critical of the plant's management.
"I think Putin regarded the work I had done with respect," he said, explaining why the president ultimately consented.
Blotsky's publisher, Boris Likhachyov, said the book -- which begins with Putin's ancestors and childhood and ends with his service in the KGB -- caught his eye thanks to its "new methodology" of research and its "conscientious, lively ... and literary" approach.
Likhachyov's publishing house, Mezhdunarodniye Otnosheniya, or International Relations, has already sold almost the entire 3,000-copy pilot print run, he said. The book's declared print run, to be completed in the near future, is 15,000 copies.
Blotsky said "A Life Story" is the first book of a planned trilogy based on 10 to 20 hours of interviews with the president, mostly at his home in Novoogaryovo, as well as with first lady Lyudmila Putin, other relatives and long-time friends. The author added that he is now working on the second book in the series, subtitled "The Road to Power."
Blotsky brushed away suggestions that he was trying to create a new cult of personality around Putin, who he said has read the book but not yet commented on it.
"When I started out, my knowledge of Putin was zero point zero ... but I came to respect him enormously because he is a self-made man," he said.
Blotsky added that the abundance of praise in the biography was not his intention, but merely reflected the common points of view of unrelated people -- who speak of Putin's humility and candor, his assertiveness and diligence, his love for his family and friends.
But any biography is molded by its author. And "A Life Story," written in simple, often colloquial language, begins with a cryptic tear-jerker, which sets the tone for the rest of the book.
The scene is a rainy day at a cemetery outside St. Petersburg in May 2000, just two weeks after Putin's inauguration. A wind-tattered photograph of a woman, raindrops streaming down her cheeks "like endless tears," falls from the plain cement cross where it had been held by a black shoestring. A bereaved visitor, the woman's daughter-in-law, picks up the photo and weeps because she cannot afford a proper tombstone.
She decides her last resort is to appeal to Putin and, finally, the reader gets the connection: The deceased, Tamara Chizhova, was Putin's teacher from the first to fourth grade.
"Imagine what desperation Chizhova's daughter-in-law had been driven to if she sent a letter to Moscow," the callous capital "blind to the tears of its citizens," writes Blotsky. "It is unclear whether Vladimir Putin read this letter, but ... right in time for Teacher's Day, a tombstone for the Leningrad teacher Tamara Pavlovna Chizhova, who spent her entire life teaching elementary school, had been erected."
In his introduction, Blotsky criticizes other Putin "experts" for being either superficial or one-sided and says Western specialists on Russia try to use inapplicable criteria in their analyses, "constantly attempting to calculate the volume of water in meters."
His aim, he writes, is to recreate the historical and social context in which Putin was formed: a hard-working blue-collar family surviving in the postwar years when the cloak-and-dagger world of spying was glorified in prose and film.
This fascination is perhaps something Blotsky, 37, can relate to. As the son of a career officer, he spent his childhood living in a number of the Soviet Union's closed military settlements and was educated as a military interpreter specializing in Dari, the Afghan dialect of the Farsi language.
During both wars in Chechnya, Blotsky worked in the republic as a reporter. At the beginning of 2000, he filmed Russian troops there dragging the bodies of Chechen rebels, some with tied hands and feet, to mass graves and sold the footage to Frank Hoefling, a correspondent with the Munich-based cable network N24. While military officials said the rebels had been killed in fighting, the German reporter -- who claimed the tape as his own -- said they were victims of torture. Hoefling was fired two days after the incident, and Blotsky said the German apologized to him
Blotsky said Monday that he does not expect to profit from the Russian edition of the Putin biography, which was funded by the Baltic Construction Company, a large building firm controlled by a friend of Blotsky's. The proceeds, he said, would go to a special-care unit at Moscow's maternity hospital No. 15, which was chosen by his wife.
If the future does hold profits, Blotsky expects them to come from Western translations. His publisher, Likhachyov, announced that inquiries about translation rights had already been made by Bulgarian, Slovenian and Chinese colleagues.
Journalist Oleg Blotsky, whose book "Vladimir Putin: A Life Story" was released last week, said the impetus for his project came in July 2000 during a visit to Berlin when German acquaintances spent an evening grilling him on "Who is Mr. Putin?" -- and he had nothing to tell them.
"That was the decisive moment. I began trying to find out the answer for myself," said Blotsky, who first earned press attention in February 2000 after Russian television aired a controversial videotape of mass graves in Chechnya, which a German reporter had bought from Blotsky and claimed as his own.
Blotsky, who approached Putin through his aide and top spokesman on Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, said the president had been reluctant to talk about himself, saying that everything about him was already public knowledge.
But Blotsky managed to convince him otherwise, in part by unearthing biographical details the president himself did not know: During the course of his background research, Blotsky discovered that Putin's father had not only been a Stakhanovite lathe operator at the Leningrad factory where he worked, but a renegade journalist, critical of the plant's management.
"I think Putin regarded the work I had done with respect," he said, explaining why the president ultimately consented.
Blotsky's publisher, Boris Likhachyov, said the book -- which begins with Putin's ancestors and childhood and ends with his service in the KGB -- caught his eye thanks to its "new methodology" of research and its "conscientious, lively ... and literary" approach.
Likhachyov's publishing house, Mezhdunarodniye Otnosheniya, or International Relations, has already sold almost the entire 3,000-copy pilot print run, he said. The book's declared print run, to be completed in the near future, is 15,000 copies.
Blotsky said "A Life Story" is the first book of a planned trilogy based on 10 to 20 hours of interviews with the president, mostly at his home in Novoogaryovo, as well as with first lady Lyudmila Putin, other relatives and long-time friends. The author added that he is now working on the second book in the series, subtitled "The Road to Power."
Blotsky brushed away suggestions that he was trying to create a new cult of personality around Putin, who he said has read the book but not yet commented on it.
"When I started out, my knowledge of Putin was zero point zero ... but I came to respect him enormously because he is a self-made man," he said.
Blotsky added that the abundance of praise in the biography was not his intention, but merely reflected the common points of view of unrelated people -- who speak of Putin's humility and candor, his assertiveness and diligence, his love for his family and friends.
But any biography is molded by its author. And "A Life Story," written in simple, often colloquial language, begins with a cryptic tear-jerker, which sets the tone for the rest of the book.
The scene is a rainy day at a cemetery outside St. Petersburg in May 2000, just two weeks after Putin's inauguration. A wind-tattered photograph of a woman, raindrops streaming down her cheeks "like endless tears," falls from the plain cement cross where it had been held by a black shoestring. A bereaved visitor, the woman's daughter-in-law, picks up the photo and weeps because she cannot afford a proper tombstone.
She decides her last resort is to appeal to Putin and, finally, the reader gets the connection: The deceased, Tamara Chizhova, was Putin's teacher from the first to fourth grade.
"Imagine what desperation Chizhova's daughter-in-law had been driven to if she sent a letter to Moscow," the callous capital "blind to the tears of its citizens," writes Blotsky. "It is unclear whether Vladimir Putin read this letter, but ... right in time for Teacher's Day, a tombstone for the Leningrad teacher Tamara Pavlovna Chizhova, who spent her entire life teaching elementary school, had been erected."
In his introduction, Blotsky criticizes other Putin "experts" for being either superficial or one-sided and says Western specialists on Russia try to use inapplicable criteria in their analyses, "constantly attempting to calculate the volume of water in meters."
His aim, he writes, is to recreate the historical and social context in which Putin was formed: a hard-working blue-collar family surviving in the postwar years when the cloak-and-dagger world of spying was glorified in prose and film.
This fascination is perhaps something Blotsky, 37, can relate to. As the son of a career officer, he spent his childhood living in a number of the Soviet Union's closed military settlements and was educated as a military interpreter specializing in Dari, the Afghan dialect of the Farsi language.
During both wars in Chechnya, Blotsky worked in the republic as a reporter. At the beginning of 2000, he filmed Russian troops there dragging the bodies of Chechen rebels, some with tied hands and feet, to mass graves and sold the footage to Frank Hoefling, a correspondent with the Munich-based cable network N24. While military officials said the rebels had been killed in fighting, the German reporter -- who claimed the tape as his own -- said they were victims of torture. Hoefling was fired two days after the incident, and Blotsky said the German apologized to him
Blotsky said Monday that he does not expect to profit from the Russian edition of the Putin biography, which was funded by the Baltic Construction Company, a large building firm controlled by a friend of Blotsky's. The proceeds, he said, would go to a special-care unit at Moscow's maternity hospital No. 15, which was chosen by his wife.
If the future does hold profits, Blotsky expects them to come from Western translations. His publisher, Likhachyov, announced that inquiries about translation rights had already been made by Bulgarian, Slovenian and Chinese colleagues.