Home » Topics » World Leaders » Vladimir Putin » Vladimir Putin: Plagiarism
Vladimir Putin, born in 1952, has held various leadership roles in the Russian government, but is primarily known as the second President of Russia who succeeded Boris Yeltsin. Putin held this position from 2000 to 2008. He was succeeded by Dmitry Medvedev. Putin is currently the Prime Minister of Russia.
Before becoming involved in the top levels of the Russian government, Vladimir Putin worked in the KGB, Russia's spy agency. Over time, Putin achieved many connections with powerful individuals as well as privileges of access to most of Russia's most secret national security elements. This led to the popular worldwide image of Putin as a shrewd, calculating individual with a tight grip on power. These perceived traits have surrounded his presidency and other roles in government.
In 1992, Vladimir Putin wrote a dissertation while pursuing a degree from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. The dissertation was focused around the general topic of economics and national interests.
In 2006, various news organizations began reporting that Putin may have taken whole portions of his dissertation from a previously published work entitled "Strategic Planning and Policy." The work was written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in America. The American press identified them as William R. King, a specialist in information systems, and David I. Cleland, a former civilian employee of the U. S. Air Force. The two men had been engaged in writing about strategies for leadership that would be useful in corporate consulting.
Those with access to the documents found that up to 16 pages of text had been copied, as well as various tables and diagrams. Much of this content regarded policy initiatives and strategies that later proved useful to Putin in the administration of the large Russian Federation, the formal term for today's Russian nation-state, which used to be the Soviet Union. Experts have identified the information that is alleged to have been plagiarized as regarding a kind of "corporate model" of government administration. Some observers of Putin's administration feel that the leader ended up using much of what King and Cleland wrote about; as President of Russia, Putin ran a large nation-state that was exploring the benefits of free market capitalism. By contrast, previous leaders of the prior Soviet Union had run a command-style economy under Communist leadership.
The original findings of plagiarism came from the Brookings Institute, a research agency in America. Newspapers around the world began to report this story as details became available. Western researchers reported problems with finding the actual text of Putin's dissertation. As for the reaction from the school that accepted Putin's work, Russian media reported that several officials, including the provost of economics at the school and the chairman of the dissertation council, denied seeing the plagiarism in the dissertation. The rector at St. Petersburg Mining Institute, Vladimir Litvinenko, was quoted as saying that Putin did not receive "special treatment." Litvinenko also speculated that King and Cleland could have taken the ideas in their work from other authors before them, and that the original writers of some of the concepts in the dissertation were leaders in the previous Russian federation, the Soviet Union.
However, other Russian officials at the time claimed that the story was part of a greater issue of plagiarism having become rampant in the country's academic institutions, especially in relation to the sciences. There were reports of many dissertations being bought or being otherwise illegitimate. Some academics criticized the way that the Russian schools dealt with the issue by pointing out that in many other countries, plagiarism is not accepted in the academic world. Media reports in Russia at the time showed that officials estimated up to 30 percent of dissertations were being bought or plagiarized.
Largely due to Putin's power in Russia, the alleged plagiarism did not result in significant consequences. Over time, the story became cold and, although some critics continued to use it as leverage in opposing Putin's policies, it became largely irrelevant to the world media. Some of those who followed the path of Putin's administration later contended that the ideas present in the supposedly plagiarized work did influence some of his leadership decisions, particularly related to energy issues and the nationalization of certain key interests.
Although the actual text of the dissertation is not widely available, reports on the issue can provide insight into the inner workings of Putin's cabinet and his outlook on some policy issues. It's also a useful example of how international copyright issues can present problems in effective enforcement of intellectual property rights. In this case, the fact that Putin held so much power over the domestic Russian press and legal system prevented internal scrutiny, while the limitations of international enforcement prevented the original authors from doing much to defend their ownership of the work.
States News Service; March 11, 2014
The Christian Science Monitor; May 11, 2006
Iran Times International (Washington, DC); July 19, 2013
AP Worldstream; April 4, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times; April 4, 2006
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