Putin the plagiarist

last updated 8 January 2015

Moscow

President Vladimir Putin copied huge portions of his 1997 Ph.D. economics dissertation from an American textbook, the Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, has found. Putin, at the time a little-known apparatchik, wrote “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations” to boost his academic credentials after he was appointed to serve in the Kremlin under then President Boris Yeltsin. “I calculate that there are more than 16 pages worth of text taken verbatim,” Brookings Institution analyst Clifford Gaddy said. The Kremlin refused to comment on the allegation.