| http://canoe.ca/CNEWSFeatures0102/23_putin-ap.html
Friday, February 23, 2001 German banker's wife offers glimpse inside Putin household BERLIN (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin's wife once called him a "vampire," and the former KGB agent believes there is no place in Russia where one can talk without being overheard, according to a book published this week by a self-described former confidante of Russia's first lady. Irene Pietsch's book, Fragile Friendships, traces her relationship with Lyudmila Putin, from the time they first met in 1995 until their last contact three years later when Vladimir Putin agreed to head the KGB's successor, the Federal Security Service. "It was obvious that we had to break off contact" at that point, the Hamburg daily Die Welt quoted Pietsch, the wife of a Hamburg banker, as saying Friday. But, she said, Lyudmila Putin has received a copy of the book, and "I'm told she took it positively." The book offers a rare and not always flattering glimpse of life inside the Putin household. Vladimir Putin doesn't drink, his wife says, according to excerpts published by the news magazine Der Spiegel, but still spends too much time in the evenings with his friends -- gatherings for which Lyudmila Putin is required to serve the drinks and snacks. "Unfortunately, he's a vampire," she jokes. Lyudmila Putin's fondness for horoscopes irritates her husband, Pietsch writes, adding that Vladimir Putin once told her she would deserve a monument if she were to spend three weeks with his wife. Pietsch's book is published in German by the Vienna-based Molden Verlag. Neither the publisher nor Pietsch could be reached for comment Friday. The two got to know each other in 1995 when Putin's wife visited Hamburg -- the sister city to St. Petersburg, where Putin was then deputy mayor. Pietsch recalls the Putins' daughters as "the best-raised children I ever met." By 1997, Vladimir Putin was working for then-Kremlin property manager Pavel Borodin, and the Putins invited Pietsch and her husband to their government dacha in Arkhangelskoye -- a visit where Putin talked politics, endorsing a Russian version of Germany's social democracy. The following year, Lyudmila Putin was shopping in Hamburg again, complaining that her husband refused her a credit card. "I'll never become like Raisa Gorbachev," she reportedly said. She also told Pietsch that Putin "always goes to Finland when he has something important to discuss. He believes you can discuss nothing in the whole of Russia without being overheard." |
