Branching off the main street of Tbilisi’s Old Town is Anton Catholicos Street, named after the Georgian Catholicos-Patriarch Anton I (1720–1788), a forerunner of the Georgian Enlightenment. Nomen est omen: the street happens to lead to a former Catholic church, although during the Soviet period it was converted into a magnificent chamber theatre.
It was on the corner where this street meets the main thoroughfare that the first anti-Russian graffiti appeared after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, as they did throughout the city. Here, however, perhaps because of its central location, they gradually merged into a continuous protest wall, encompassing every major theme of the Georgian opposition: from resistance to the Russian occupiers—reaching back to 1921 and even earlier—to solidarity with Ukraine’s defenders and rejection of Georgia’s pro-Russian government.
1783: the signing of the Treaty of Georgievsk, repeatedly violated by Russia • 1801: Tsar Paul I abolishes Georgian statehood and annexes the country to Russia • 1811: The Georgian Church loses its autocephaly and is subordinated to the Russian Orthodox Church • 1832: A conspiracy by Georgian nobles is uncovered, its participants punished and exiled • 1921: The Red Army overthrows the independent Democratic Republic of Georgia, forcibly incorporating the country into the Soviet Union • 1937: Stalin’s Great Purge: thousands of members of the Georgian elite are murdered • 1978: The new Soviet constitution attempts to strip the Georgian language of its status as the state language, triggering massive demonstrations • 1989 (the Tbilisi Massacre): on 9 April, the Soviet Army crushes a peaceful pro-independence demonstration with poison gas and entrenching shovels • 1991: Moscow attempts to prevent Georgian independence through political and economic pressure • 1992 and 1993: The Russian army and intelligence services support (and most probably instigate) Abkhaz and Ossetian separatism • 1999: As part of the Chechen War, Russia bombs Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge • 2008: Using a South Ossetian incident provoked by Russia as a pretext, the Russian army occupies South Ossetia and crosses into Georgia proper, killing many Georgian soldiers even after the ceasefire
Above: Corporal Giorgi Antsukhelidze, captured by the Russian army in Tskhinvali on 9 August 2008. After being brutally tortured—a video of which was uploaded to the internet—he was beaten to death. He was declared a National Hero of Georgia, and his portrait, accompanied by the inscription არ დანებდე ar danebde! (“don’t give up!”), has become one of the iconic motifs of the anti-occupation graffiti. • Below: Maro Makashvili, a university student who volunteered as a nurse at the outbreak of the Soviet invasion in 1921 and became one of its first heroic casualties. Georgian literature remembers her as “the Georgian Joan of Arc”, and her diary is required school reading
I have been following this wall for perhaps a decade now, and its subtle year-to-year changes faithfully reflect the mood of the opposition. I last saw it in May, and this time I noticed only one major new addition: a gravestone, erected in advance—in an act of wishful thinking—for the grave of the man who is currently the most hated enemy of the Georgian people.
The gravestone contains several expressions that require a footnote:
• Z • The general symbol of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, originally the marking painted on Russian military vehicles used in the campaign, although its precise meaning remains unclear. On the gravestone it is obviously used in place of the traditional cross.
• Putler • A portmanteau of the names Putin and Hitler. It first appeared in Georgia after the Russian invasion of 2008, spread in Ukraine following the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, and became known worldwide after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The main arguments underlying the comparison are territorial expansion and the denial of neighbouring states’ sovereignty, intensive state propaganda and a personality cult, dictatorial methods of rule, and the violent suppression of political opposition.
• Khuylo • Derived from the vulgar word хуй (“cock”, “dick”) with the pejorative suffix -ло, meaning roughly “asshole” or “piece of shit”, only considerably stronger. The word had long existed in both Russian and Ukrainian slang, but it became specifically associated with Putin after participants in a football supporters’ march in Kharkiv in March 2014 began chanting the rhythmic and highly memorable Путін — хуйло! Ла-ла-ла-ла-ла! chant, which soon became the universal slogan of anti-Russian demonstrations.
• Ukrainians and bunker • An obvious reference, on the one hand, to Ukraine’s recent successes on the Russian front, and on the other to Hitler’s death, a similar fate being wished upon Putin—preferably before the end of this very year, 2026.
There is, however, one element of the gravestone that at first glance seems unremarkable, and only becomes meaningful when one remembers that Putin was officially born not in 1950 but in 1952. How could the creator of such an insider inscription have made a mistake precisely about the year of his birth?
The point is that the year 1950 has a meaning of its own. It refers to a legend that has stubbornly persisted in Georgian public opinion for years. According to this story, Putin’s real mother raised her son—born in 1950—in the Georgian village of Metekhi until he was nine years old, when she gave him up to foster parents in Russia.
The story begins when Rustam Daudov, the Tbilisi representative of the Chechen government driven into exile during the Second Chechen War in 1999, heard a local rumour that an elderly woman named Vera Putina was living in the village of Metekhi, sixty kilometres west of Tbilisi on the banks of the Mtkvari (Kura) River. She claimed that Vladimir Putin—who had become Acting President of Russia following Boris Yeltsin’s resignation—was in fact her son: she had recognised him on television. In January 2000, Daudov travelled to meet her and recorded a lengthy video interview.
In the interview, Vera Putina recounts that she was born in 1926 in the village of Ochyor, at the foot of the Ural Mountains. She trained as an agricultural machinery mechanic, where she met a mechanic named Platon Privalov, by whom she became pregnant. Only afterwards did she discover that Privalov was married, so she left him and returned to her native village. There, on 7 October 1950, she gave birth to a son, Vladimir, who received her maiden surname. Two years later, while attending a training course in Tashkent, she met a Georgian named Giorgi Osepashvili. They married and settled in Metekhi. The boy was raised there until the age of nine, when, at the insistence of his stepfather—who considered him uncontrollably aggressive—his mother took him back to Russia. There he was adopted by distant relatives, also bearing the surname Putin, whose own two sons had died during the war. In Putin’s later official biography they are presented as his biological parents, although his “mother” was already forty-one years old in 1952, an unusually advanced age for childbirth in the Soviet Union at the time.
According to the story, the adoptive Putin couple made Vova “two years younger” because, having spent his childhood in Georgia, he had learned very little Russian reading, and only by reducing his age could they enrol him in a class matching his level of education. It is important to note, however, that his official birthday remained 7 October.
When Daudov asked for evidence, Vera Putina said that the security services had already visited her and taken away all her photographs and documents. It was only later, after the story had become public, that the Daily Telegraph located the school’s class register, in which a pupil named Vladimir Putin appears in exactly the years she had described.
Daudov contacted Artyom Borovik, one of Russia’s most renowned investigative journalists, hoping to publish the video before the Russian presidential election of 26 March 2000, thereby weakening the electoral prospects of Putin, who had launched the Second Chechen War. On 17 March, Borovik boarded a flight from Moscow to Tbilisi. Shortly after take-off, the aircraft exploded due to technical problems that have never been fully explained. There were no survivors.
Daudov then handed the tape to the Italian journalist Antonio Russo as well. Russo was found dead the following morning in what appeared to be a staged road accident, while all of his documents—including the tape—had disappeared from his hotel room. The Italian investigators sent to examine the case were expelled from Georgia after two weeks. Of the two Georgian police officers involved in the investigation, one soon committed suicide, while the other was poisoned.
Later, the Chechen office in Tbilisi was dissolved, and Daudov took a position at the Chechen office in Baku, travelling frequently between the two capitals. On 7 September 2003, the Baku police discovered a body near the Gagarin Bridge. The victim had been killed by five gunshots and was identified as a Chechen named Rustam Daudov. But “our” Daudov was already on a plane back to Tbilisi at the time. If he had indeed been the intended target, the killers had found the wrong man. Following this incident, Daudov and his family left Tbilisi with assistance from the United Nations.
That is the story, which in Georgia is regarded as true by more or less everyone. Naturally, there are no conclusive documentary proofs apart from the class register and a single surviving childhood photograph, which cannot be unequivocally identified as depicting the later Putin.
We do, however, have a number of sources. After the story emerged, the Dutch filmmaker Ineke Smits travelled to Metekhi in 2003, where she spent several months interviewing Vera Putina, the villagers, and Vova’s former classmates and teachers. They all stated that the boy they had known was today’s Vladimir Putin. The result was her documentary film Putin’s Mama.
Kate Weinberg published an article in the 5 December 2008 issue of The Daily Telegraph entitled Could this woman be Vladimir Putin’s real mother? The article was preceded by extensive field research, during which the above-mentioned school register was also located.
Steffen Dobbert published a highly detailed on-the-spot report in the 7 May 2015 issue of Die Zeit, together with a comprehensive summary of all the sources available at the time, recounting essentially the same story outlined above.
In 2022, Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich published an investigative biography of Putin entitled Wowa, Wołodia, Władimir: tajemnice Rosji Putina (Vova, Volodya, Vladimir: The Secrets of Putin’s Russia), in which she also recounts in detail the story of his alleged Georgian childhood, concluding that it cannot be substantiated.
And indeed, if this is what really happened, but the security services removed the documents, how could it ever be proven?
It is also a fact that no photographs or documentary records of Vladimir Putin’s childhood are known from before the age of ten. Everything that supposedly happened earlier is known only from his own autobiographical account.
Vera Putina’s daughter told the Die Zeit correspondent that a few years earlier a police officer and two nurses had visited her mother, taken a blood sample from her without explaining why, and then disappeared. The family suspected that the purpose had been a DNA test. The result, however, has never been made public.
In the absence of conclusive evidence, the historical consensus is therefore that, although it is well documented that a boy named Vladimir Putin lived in Metekhi during the 1950s, nothing is known about his subsequent fate, and it cannot be demonstrated that he was the same person as Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia.
Vera Putina died on 30 May 2023 at the age of ninety-six and was buried in Metekhi. She told the story as she believed it to be true. The other person who could speak with authority about the truth is Vladimir Putin himself. He, however, has never confirmed or denied the account of his alleged mother. Only his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, responded to an enquiry from The Daily Telegraph, stating that “the story is not true” and that the President’s biography is available in detail on the Kremlin’s official website.
And if the inscription on the gravestone has foretold the future correctly, Putin himself may not have much time left to tell the truth.
But perhaps it no longer matters.
* * *
Appendix
Almost all of the sources used for this article are available through the internet links provided, and nearly all are in English. There is one exception. Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich’s 2022 biography Wowa, Wołodia, Władimir: tajemnice Rosji Putina (Vova, Volodya, Vladimir: The Secrets of Putin’s Russia) has been published only as a book and only in Polish, a language inaccessible to many readers. For that reason, I reproduce here, in translation, the most important part of the chapter dealing with Putin’s alleged Georgian childhood: Vera Putina’s own account.
Vera, née Putin, might never have made her confession had people not appeared in Metekhi who took a particular interest in her and in the family of her husband, Giorgi Osepashvili. The strangers asked about Vera’s little son, Volodya, who had arrived in the village as a small child, had been raised by the Osepashvili family, and then disappeared shortly before his tenth birthday. They also asked to see photographs of little Vova, and afterwards took every one of them away. There were only a handful. It was only then that the inhabitants of Metekhi realised that their Vova had become Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
The whole affair might have remained nothing more than village gossip had a Georgian man not visited the Tbilisi representation of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria on 3 January 2000, claiming that Vladimir Putin’s real mother lived in the nearby village of Metekhi and that, for half a million dollars, he was willing to take them to her. The Chechens laughed at him, since they already knew the Russian presidential candidate’s official biography from the internet. It stated unequivocally that his mother had died a year earlier.
They only began to take the matter seriously when, towards the end of the conversation, they realised that the visitor was an officer of the Georgian security services, which wished to rid itself of this increasingly inconvenient woman through someone else’s hands. At the time, Chechen kidnappers were notorious throughout the world, so had this abduction also been attributed to them, nobody would have been surprised. Nor would they have had the slightest chance of proving their innocence, especially amid the ongoing war in the Chechen Republic.
The Georgian placed on the table an old photograph of a warmly wrapped small child together with an expert report stating that it depicted Vladimir Putin as a boy. He then switched on a tape recorder containing interviews with villagers who recalled Vera’s son, the boy called Vova, who had lived among them for years. The Chechens now understood that if Vera Nikolayevna, née Putin, really was the mother of Russia’s future president, then she had become a highly inconvenient person for Putin and could easily come to harm.
It also became clear that if such a serious—and rather sensational—falsehood in the presidential candidate’s biography were exposed during the election campaign, it would not destroy Vladimir Putin’s chances of reaching the Kremlin, but it would seriously damage his public image. That would have delighted all of his opponents, and the Chechens most of all. For the previous six months, Russian bombs had been devastating their country, tanks had been crushing it beneath their tracks, and its citizens had been subjected to torture at almost every military checkpoint—all on the orders of Vladimir Putin, who was directing the so-called “anti-terrorist operation.”
The head of the Chechen Information Centre in Tbilisi therefore immediately contacted his superior, Vakha Ibrahimov. They decided to verify the story and, if it proved true, to make it public. Only in this way could they hope to obtain some measure of protection for themselves and for Vera Nikolayevna. But before going public, they needed tangible evidence in addition to the testimony of Vera and the villagers—at the very least, photographs. Those, however, had already been removed from the village by someone else.
The Chechens eventually travelled to meet Vera Nikolayevna together with journalists from the Georgian newspaper Alia.
Near the school in Metekhi stood a modest little house, beside it a vine-covered arbor. It was here that Vakha Ibrahimov first met the diminutive woman whose determined gestures and light, deep-set eyes gave her face a striking expression.
“It is embarrassing to recall all this,” Vera Nikolayevna said, visibly uncomfortable in the presence of the journalists. “It is difficult to return to old mistakes and old misfortunes. After all, half a century has passed.”
Yet she tried to speak. At times she faltered, as though her melodious Russian words had to be unearthed from beneath the harsh, guttural sounds of the Georgian language. She struggled to compress the story of an entire lifetime into a few simple sentences. Her faded blue eyes would suddenly brighten, as if illuminated from within, only to cloud over again with tears. Her toothless mouth alternated between a gentle smile and the grimace of impending sobs.
“I was born…” she began, but immediately broke off. Rising from her chair, she disappeared into the house and returned carrying a yellowed, stained identity document.
Vera Nikolayevna Putina was born on 6 September 1926 in the village of Terekhino, near the small town of Ochyor in the Perm region of the Urals. She was the only daughter among the four children of Anna Ilyinichna and Nikolai Ilarionovich Putin.
After the war she enrolled at the Agricultural Mechanisation Technical College. In those difficult post-war years, the classrooms were filled with young women who had only recently been labouring in armaments factories, alongside men who had just laid down their rifles. There were more grown women than girls, and more adult men than boys. It was there that the already grown Vera Nikolayevna met Platon Privalov, whose name she still found difficult to pronounce many decades later.
They lived together for a time. Vera was convinced they would marry. She was already expecting a child when—
“One day a parcel arrived for him with some food,” she recalled. “He went away for a few days, and I opened it. Inside there was bacon—and a letter from his wife. By the time he returned, I was gone. I had run back to my parents.”
In post-war Russia, having a child outside marriage was not considered an especially grave scandal. Her parents welcomed their daughter back without reproach and were probably delighted when their grandson was born in September 1950. A year later Vera, by then a qualified electromechanical technician, travelled from the cold Urals to the heat of Tashkent in Uzbekistan for a practical placement.
Next to the workers’ hostel where she lived stood a barracks used as a recreation hall. Soldiers from a nearby military unit gathered there, among them a handsome Georgian named Giorgi Osepashvili. That was where they met.
To the inhabitants of impoverished post-war Russia, Georgia—the land of oranges and vineyards—seemed almost like a paradise flowing with milk and honey. Vera therefore accepted without question Giorgi’s stories that he was a wealthy man who owned a large house in Tbilisi.
In the harsh Urals where Vera had grown up, people probably knew little of the boundless imagination for which Caucasians were reputed. So when Giorgi told her, “I'm leaving the army. I need a wife. I don’t want to return home alone. My mother has died, and my father has remarried,” Vera made her decision within three days.
“Everything happened so quickly,” she sighed many years later. Perhaps because, before Epiphany, following the old Russian custom of Christmas fortune-telling, she had looked into a mirror and seen a man in uniform who reminded her of Giorgi. Perhaps because Giorgi wanted to be with her despite the fact that she already had a child by another man. Or perhaps she simply fell in love.
Whatever the reason, she did not flee the village of Metekhi, even though Giorgi did not even have a house of his own, and the room in his father’s home had nothing but a beaten-earth floor. Instead, a year later she asked her mother to bring her little son to Georgia. Anna Ilyinichna did so despite the objections of Vera’s father, who never reconciled himself to his only daughter’s choice. According to family recollections, the old communist hated Stalin—who was Georgian—and regarded Georgia as a foreign and uncivilised land: a place one might visit on holiday, but never spend an entire lifetime.
Here, in fact, the prologue to the story written by fate comes to an end—a story whose central figure until now has been Vera Nikolayevna, née Putin, later Osepashvili. At this point, the real protagonist enters the stage.
The little boy was not yet three years old when the ground first gave way beneath his feet. He was torn from the security of the house in Terekhino, from the embrace of the woman he undoubtedly believed to be his mother, and from the side of the man who, to him, was his father. He found himself in a place where everything was unfamiliar: a new mother, a new father, and a new home.
According to psychologists, among the factors that shape a child’s emotional development—especially that of a three-year-old—such as tranquillity, loving care, and the fulfilment of basic needs, the most important is a sense of security. Since that sense of security is profoundly undermined by separation from the people to whom the child is most deeply attached, and since those attachments are strongest at such a young age, one can imagine how traumatic this “transplantation to Georgia” must have been for little Vladimir.
The nervous system of a three-year-old is still immature, and the development of self-awareness and self-confidence remains extremely fragile. At this stage of life these qualities can easily be strengthened—but just as easily suppressed. According to psychologists, the latter may result in serious disturbances, including a tendency to lie, aggressive behaviour, or even psychopathic traits.
Yet Vera had brought her little son to Georgia out of love and longing. Perhaps, then, one should not attach excessive importance to the gloomy predictions of psychologists. Did the child have a home? He did, however humble it may have been. Did he have a mother? He did—and a loving one at that. The fair-haired, blue-eyed little boy was apparently well liked by his new family; some even recalled that he was their favourite. Perhaps that is why someone photographed him at a time when owning a camera in a village was still a rarity.
Yet little Vovochka does not appear happy in the photograph. His stepfather, Giorgi, gave the picture to his brother Vakhtang, who lived in Gori. On the reverse, in clumsy Russian handwriting, someone wrote:
“As a keepsake for Nina and Vakhtang from Goga. My son, Vovka. Vovka cried terribly and did not want to have his picture taken. He grabbed the photographer's little bell and kept saying, 'Home, home!' So instead of looking like a brave little hero or soldier, this Vovik comes across as nothing more than a crying little boy.”
Even if he felt happy there—or at least reasonably content—that did not last long. Giorgi worked at a brick factory and was building a new house. Vera Nikolayevna was expecting another child. To the stepfather, the little outsider increasingly became a burden.
Meanwhile the boy grew older and became accustomed to hearing the words nabichvari and bezrodny shouted after him—meaning a child without a family, a bastard of unknown father. The Caucasus had its own rules. A child born out of wedlock did not fit within them. Nor did the woman who had given birth to him. And the older the boy became, the more painfully he experienced this reality.
“Did his stepfather beat him?” Vakha Ibrahimov asked Vera Nikolayevna.
“He didn’t beat him,” the woman replied, “but he didn’t want him there.”
What else could she have said about the man with whom she had shared thousands of days and nights, and who even now seemed somehow still to be close by? Years later, while raking dry leaves around her husband’s grave, she spoke of him with difficulty, struggling through her memories:
“He had a quarrelsome nature. There was no shortage of difficult times. But we always stayed together. He needed me. If he got into a fight with someone, I wouldn’t speak to him for months. But it was always he who came to make peace, never I. That was our marriage. It had its good moments and its bad ones. There was a little of everything. That’s life. Even I no longer understand myself.”
And what is there to understand? Those emotions, so vivid and pure in their time, though faded today, had a simple name: love.
In Metekhi, one only has to walk a few houses away from Vera Nikolayevna’s home, speak to some of the elderly neighbours, and ask about little Vova. This is the sort of story they tell:
“Right here, by this house where he lived, he would often squat against the wall, leaning silently with his back to it. He was such a poor little boy. Vera protected him, but Giorgi beat him—sometimes with his belt. And drink was never far from him, either. Once Vova was locked inside the house. He was freezing and started shouting. The walls here were thin. He cried, ‘Auntie Lilo, help me! I'm so cold!’ It was a very sad story.”
Mamuko, one of the Osepashvilis’ neighbours, remembered it this way:
“Sometimes Goga beat him with a stick and then drove him out into the cold. He even begrudged him decent clothes, because they themselves had very little. The boy was always dressed in patched trousers. No one blamed Goga for it. After all, who wants to raise someone else’s child? Especially when everyone laughs behind your back. People used to say, ‘Vera dragged home a bastard, but she can’t even remember who the father was.’ Goga endured the mockery for a long time, but eventually he sent the boy away.”
Dali Gzirishvili recalled:
“When we moved there, we became neighbours. Vova must have been about five. We were the same age. He was a small, fair-haired boy with quick, energetic movements, just like his mother. I didn’t even know his name was Vladimir. Everyone simply called him Vova. I felt sorry for him because they lived in great poverty. I always gave him apples, pears, and grapes because we had a vineyard. He accepted everything. He usually waited for me in the same place, near their gate, because he knew I would always save something for him. We often played together. He was such a sad little boy. He liked going fishing, too. I knew he wasn't Giorgi's son. Whenever the village children mocked him because of his mother, he became terribly upset and burst into tears. He simply couldn't bear it. The other children knew how much it hurt him, so they kept provoking him and laughing at him. He took it all very seriously—and he cried.”
– He was a quiet, sad, withdrawn child – Vaha Ibrahimov heard from Nora Gogolashvili, a lower-grade teacher at the Metekhi primary school. – He was an excellent student. Of all the games, he liked fighting the most. He enrolled in sambo at an early age. [ ] He wore patched clothes [ ]. I bought his textbooks for him. They were in a difficult situation. I told his mother that if she gave him up for adoption, I would gladly take him in. I felt very sorry for him. He clung to me like a little kitten.
– They say that you were Vova's only friend, and that you were both excellent students. Is that true? – Vaha Ibrahimov asks Gabriel Datashvili.
– Yes. Apart from me, Vova really had no friends.
– Was he a quarrelsome boy? Did he misbehave? – Ibrahimov continues.
– No, quite the opposite. He was a quiet, reserved boy. After classes, he often went alone to the river to fish. Sometimes he came to my place, and we played together: sometimes war games, sometimes we practised fencing, played football and wrestled. He was better at that because of sambo.
One day Vovka disappeared. The terrified Vera Nikolayevna was told that she would never see him again. The boy – who was by then almost ten years old – was this time “placed” in the home of a childless major in Tbilisi. Giorgi's sister took on the role of intermediary. Vera, however, began to beg her, and a few days later the woman gave the mother her son's address.
Could this mother have done anything other than take him as far away from here as possible? Back to his parental home, to the Urals.
– I very much wanted to stay in the Urals – she told journalists years later. – I wanted to stay with Vovka, to break away from this village life, I wanted to study... But could I have done it? In Metekhi my two daughters were waiting for me, and Giorgi sent a telegram two days later: “Come back immediately!” And he threatened to have the militia bring me back...
In reality, it turned out that I had exchanged Vova for my daughters.
Before leaving, little Putin gave a photograph to his only friend, Gabriel Datashvili, with the inscription:
“To Gabriel, as a keepsake, from Vova.”
– I kept it for all these years – says Gabriel. – Recently I looked for it, but it had disappeared. I have no idea how or when. But if Vova Putin remembers his life in Metekhi, then he should remember me as well.
– Vovka cried terribly when I left. My heart was breaking, but I did not even hug him. Yet not even in my worst nightmare did I imagine that I was saying goodbye to him forever – Vera Nikolayevna told the camera, while her tears one after another found their way through the furrows of her face.
Add comment