Lyudmila Putina

Born on January 6, 1958, in Kaliningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, Lyudmila is the daughter of Alexander Abramovich (or Avramovich) Shkrebnev and Catherine Tikhonovna Shkrebneva. She has a sister named Olga Alexandrovna (Tsomayeva). Alexander provided for his family by working at a local mechanical plant.

After finishing high school, she enrolled at the Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University) to study Spanish language and philology, graduating in 1986.

Between the time Lyudmila finished school and when she enrolled at the university, she found employment at Aeroflot’s Kaliningrad branch as a flight attendant. When she and Vladimir Putin met in Leningrad, he was already a rising star in the KGB.

Putin had joined Soviet Russia’s legendary security agency in 1975. After finishing his training, he began to work as the Second Chief Directorate (counter-intelligence) and later, was promoted to the First Chief Directorate where he was tasked to gather information on foreign operatives in Leningrad. They married on July 28, 1983.

The union produced two daughters. Mariya was born on April 28, 1985, in Leningrad. That year, the family moved to Dresden, East Germany when Vladimir was posted there. On August 31, 1986, Lyudmila gave birth to Yekaterina (Katja).

In Dresden, while he served his country as a secret agent using the cover identity as a translator, she was active as a linguist herself. After the Communist East German government collapsed, the family returned to Leningrad. Lyudmila took up teaching German at the Leningrad State University in 1990.

In 1991, Soviet Russia itself collapsed. Lyudmila was affiliated with the university, which was renamed Saint Petersburg State University after the name of the city itself was changed, till 1994.

Vladimir Putin became one of the three First Deputy Prime Ministers on August 9, 1999, and later on that day, he was named the acting Prime Minister of the Government of the Russian Federation by then-President Boris Yeltsin. A week later, his appointment received approval from the State Duma. He served two presidential terms (2004-08, 2008-12) before becoming Prime Minister for the second time.

The complexity of Putin’s career quite accurately reflects his almost absolute control on Russia. In May 1999, Lyudmila replaced Tamara Stepashina, wife of then Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, as the second lady of Russia and in 2008, she replaced Zoya Zoubkova, wife of Viktor Zubkov,

Lyudmila, as the second lady of Russia, maintained the same reclusive lifestyle as she had since the beginning of her husband’s political career. She and her husband decided to pull Mariya and Katja out of the German school. Since then, no photograph of them has ever been published nor a family portrait been circulated.