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The KGB agent turned politician Russian president Vladimir Putin
is now facing a charge of plagiarism. The US researchers have revealed that Russian
president’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two
professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978. According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Putin’s work 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. Moreover, the US researchers are of view that his thesis was for a lesser degree that would not have entitled him to a full doctorate. The Washington Times reported on Saturday that six diagrams and tables from the 218-page thesis also appeared to ‘mimic’ similar charts in the US work. The newspaper quoted Gaddy as saying: “There’s no question in my mind that this would be plagiarism.” Putin’s work was entitled “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations”. After serving as a KGB agent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin moved into politics in St Petersburg. US scholars say that his academic studies in the mid-1990s may have been intended to impress the western investors who were flooding into the rapidly modernizing Russian city. “Somebody was cutting corners,” Gaddy said, “whether it was Putin or whoever cut and pasted it for him.” Plagiarism has come to be regarded in US as a fatal blot on any politician’s copybook. In light of the controversy over Russian president Vladimir Putin’s allegedly plagiarized thesis, experts on the former Soviet Union said last week it was common for ambitious “apparatchiks” to seek to inflate their credentials with an impressive-sounding degree, and that there were many cases at the time of officials hiring ghost-writers to produce work they passed off as their own.