Putin ‘Stopped Socialising Aged 11’, Says His Old School Teacher

Most of us wait till our late 20s or 30s before we stop socialising, but Vladimir Putin stopped when he was 11, according to one of his old secondary school teachers.

Born into a working-class Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) family, Putin was a badly-behaved “hooligan” as a youngster (not much change there then). In an interview appearing in his 2000 book, First Person, teacher Vera Gurevich said Putin “abruptly changed” when he was 11-years-old.

[Putin] himself changed very abruptly in the sixth grade. It was obvious he had set himself a goal.

More likely he had understood that he had to achieve something in his life.

According to Vera, he realised that he needed to improve his social status and so began playing sports and trying harder in classes. Putin avoided the school dances and “didn’t like socialising” with the other kids, opting to attend judo classes 4 times a week instead.

Here’s Putin and Vera together at a Victory Day reception in 2019:

Vera says she become like a second mother to him, keeping him on the right path and even taking him on holiday. She told the book’s authors in 2000:

I think [Putin] is a good person. But he never forgives people who betray him or are mean to him.

Well I think we can all believe that. Good thing Vera was around to be a second mother to him and ensure he didn’t “go down the wrong path”, as she puts it. Now he’s one of the richest men on Earth, is a judo expert, runs a superpower country, and thinks he can bomb all his enemies into oblivion. Maybe allowing him to turn into some bum on the streets of Russia wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all?

All jokes aside; Putin, like many people, had a rough childhood. He was born in Leningrad in 1952, a city that lived under a nearly three-year siege by the Nazis during WWII that wiped out most of the population of more than three million people. His dad was badly injured in the war, his mum nearly died of starvation. Before Putin was even born, he had lost 2 siblings. His parents had a room in run-down flat with two other families, with no hot water, no bathtub, and no heat. His parents worked in factories all day, and he was basically left to fend for himself in the company of other unruly kids in that building. He was bullied, badly. And now he’s become the biggest bully of all. Fair play to Vera for at least trying to sort him out. Who knows, maybe he would’ve been even worse without her.