The English-language website Pravda.ru once published an article postulating that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be descended from Russian royalty.
In Pravda, which was once a Communist Party newspaper but is now independent, and technically separate from its web edition, it was claimed in a 2016 article that Putin’s mysterious family name has origins in Russian royalty.
First, the Russian website noted that Putin’s “family tree is not traced after Putin’s grandfather Spiridon Putin, who left the Tver governor for St. Petersburg at the age of 15.”
Spiridion was an apparently talented chef, and managed to keep his family stable through the Communist Revolution and tense years that followed by cooking for the Communist Party. He apparently cooked for Vladimir Lenin, then worked as a chef in one of Josef Stalin’s estates.
Vladimir Putin views a naval parade in 2021
Noting that Spiridion Putin was from Tver, and that the name Putin has been totally absent from previous compendiums that explain the origins of Russian names, writer Olga Savka notes that a similar name “has appeared recently, somewhere in the middle of the 19th century.”
“The family book of the Tver region mentions the name of Putyanin – a clan of Russian princes,” Savka wrote, after noting that all Putins descend from “the clan of Putins from the Tver region.”
Savka explained in Pravda:
This name has appeared recently, somewhere in the middle of the 19th century. All Putins originally came from the clan of Putins from the Tver region. Illegitimate offsprings of noble families were often given cut names. For example, Russian writer Pnin was an illegitimate son of Field Marshal Repnin. There were lots of other occasions like that – Betskoy instead of Trubetskoy, Gribov instead of Griboyedov. The new names of unofficial clan branches were formed by means of deduction: a syllable was simply taken out of it.
Thus, the former propaganda outlet for the Communist Party concludes the name Putin could likely be shortened from Putyanin, and thus Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin could well be descended from royalty.
Vladimir Putin and his mother in 1958 (State photo)
The Putyanin, Savka wrote, “gave a lot of outstanding military leaders to Russia, as well as artists, politicians, and priests” and is “one of the oldest clans in the Russian history.”
“If President Putin is a descendant of the Putyatins clan, this means that Vladimir Putin has a relation to all royal families of Europe,” Savka charged.
Earlier this year, Pravda raised eyebrows when it predicted that the United States could enter a period of civil war due to Trump supporters.
Putin has increasingly been described as a dictator or madman since declaring a “special military operation” and invading Ukraine in February of 2022.
Russia claims the invasion was necessary to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s eastern regions from state-sponsored violence, and to protect the interests of the oblasts that have since voted to join the Russian Federation in referendums the international community dismisses.
Ukraine and its allies, meanwhile, claim the invasion was without merit.
