Vladimir Putin

Early life
Putin was born on 7 October 1952 in Leningrad, RSFSR, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation), to parents Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin (1911–1999) and Maria Ivanovna Shelomova (1911–1998). His mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, where he served in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s,[25] subsequently serving with the NKVD in a sabotage group during World War II. Two elder brothers were born in the mid–1930s; one died within a few months of birth, while the second succumbed to diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad. His paternal grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovich Putin (1879–1965), was employed at Vladimir Lenin's dacha at Gorki as a cook, and after Lenin's death in 1924, he continued to work for Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. He would later cook for Joseph Stalin when the Soviet leader visited one of his dachas in the Moscow region. Spiridon later was employed at a dacha belonging to the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which the young Putin would visit him.  MORE COMING SOON