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A picture from a long time ago: Vladimir Putin, then Prime Minister, and his former wife Lyudmila.
The picture is from 2010
Photo: IMAGO
Vladimir Putin is probably the most secretive politician in the world.
This is well known in Russia, so no one was surprised by research published a few days ago by the independent Russian media agency Vazhniye Istorii (Istories) and SPIEGEL: It turned out that Putin's youngest daughter Katerina had been with an actor for several years Selensky was married to a former employee of the Munich Ballet.
The Russian Internet exploded with jokes: they say Putin is confused, the fake Selensky is sleeping with his daughter.
For years, the Russian media has viewed the president's private life as a taboo, and it is not in the spirit of journalistic ethics to take an interest in it.
The holy terror surrounding the Russian president's personal life has gradually extended to everything that concerns him: his past, his friends, his way of life and, most importantly, the reasons for his decisions.
Vladimir Putin was by no means always a taboo personality.
When he was first elected President, he gave a series of interviews that were published in the form of a book entitled First Hands.
A little later, another book appeared, consisting of interviews with his wife Lyudmila Putina.
She told journalist Oleg Blotsky some unpleasant stories from her husband's life.
In her opinion, Putin had morally abused her for years.
The book was banned and never hit bookstore shelves, but excerpts of it can be found online.
Apparently, over time Lyudmila Putina stopped being afraid of her husband.
According to long-time family acquaintances, she was probably the only person who was not at all afraid of him: she did not care that he was president, she did not particularly listen to his opinion.
The taboo that all Russian journalists learn
In the early 1990s I worked for Kommersant, Russia's largest independent newspaper.
The editor-in-chief at the time used to say: We can afford to write that the President is wrong, that he made a mistake, or that he looks awful - but we can't write about his wife.
The first lady and the president's family were the first taboo Russian journalists learned.
It was unethical to criticize your wife – everyone agreed with this thesis.
(Apart from the President's wife, there was only one comparably risky issue – Chechnya).
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Why was this the case?
There were many explanations.
Putin apparently felt that his wife's excessive publicity made him vulnerable.
He obviously had in mind the example set by his former boss, Saint Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak (1991-1996).
His wife, Lyudmila Narusova, was always in the limelight, was politically active and always the target of harsh criticism from journalists.
Her unpopularity was widely credited as one of the reasons for Sobchak's defeat in the 1996 election.
Another factor in Putin's secrecy, of course, is the legacy of the KGB.
The principle was: the less outsiders know about the family, the safer it is.
The same principle was affirmed by all Soviet leaders.
That unswerving taboo was broken in 2008 when an obscure tabloid owned by banker Alexander Lebedev wrote that Putin was allegedly divorcing his wife and marrying Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion Alina Kabaeva.
Putin immediately retracted the story, the banker closed the newspaper, but had already drawn the ire of the authorities and the Kremlin-affiliated media.
Lebedev, a former supporter of the Kremlin-affiliated Just Russia party, was expelled from the party and stripped of his promised Senate seat.
Lebedev moved from Moscow to London and bought the Evening Standard.
The case was exemplary: paying attention to Putin's private life is a crime that inevitably faces punishment.
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At the same time, the publication looked like a leak organized by the Kremlin - the reports about the president's affair with the athlete did not damage his image at all, on the contrary.
However, Putin has taught the media and the public that no one is allowed to report on his life.
Since then, Russian media have not addressed Putin's private life at all - until Putin did so publicly in 2013.
He demonstratively went to the ballet with Lyudmila Putina, and after that he suddenly told journalists that they were already divorced.
He also noted that the First Lady "was her man for eight, yes nine years" - in other words: he confirmed the publication from 2008, the affair with the athlete.
Amazingly, the announcement of Putin's divorce came just as the propaganda battle "for traditional family values" was gaining momentum in Russia.
At that time, the Kremlin decided to mobilize the conservative electorate from the provinces.
Officially, women no longer entered Putin's life.
Years later, rumors keep spreading that Putin and Alina Kabaeva got married.
Belarusian President Lukashenko is particularly keen on rumors - he loves to gossip about Putin's personal life in conversations with foreigners, especially journalists who rarely visit Belarus.
Not everyone stuck to the taboo at all times
Yet for years the ban on reporting on Putin's personal life seemed so sacrosanct that no independent journalist flouted it.
When I wrote the book All the Kremlin's Men (Endgame) in 2014, I sincerely believed that Putin's private life has no bearing on politics.
His spokesman said, "Putin is married to Russia."
And I, too, was convinced that whoever Putin sleeps with plays no role in the decisions in the Kremlin.
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But in 2015, independent Russian journalists suddenly realized that neglecting to pay attention to the president's family is a sin and a weakness, and that a truly free press cannot allow such taboos.
And that's how it started.
On January 28, 2015, the newspaper "RBC" published an investigation into a woman named Ekaterina Tikhonova.
The report claimed that it had gained enormous influence, subdued Russia's most important university, Moscow State University, and controlled vast resources, including real estate.
"RBC" withheld only one point: that the woman was the youngest daughter of the President.
This only came to light the day after publication.
The journalist Oleg Kashin revealed the secret in his blog and ended his post with the sentence "Don't worry!".
Two days before the investigation was published, on January 26, RBC received an official warning from the Russian regulator Roskomnadzor.
The official pretext was the planned publication of a drawing in the magazine Charlie Hebdo.
According to Roskomnadzor, the drawing hurt the religious feelings of Muslims and fueled religious strife.
But the real reason, apparently, was that the Kremlin had learned about the forthcoming publication about Katerina Tikhonova and now sent a warning signal: better not to publish this issue.
Those who reported got into trouble
But the genie was long out of the bottle.
Russian journalists began writing about the president's relatives as if trying to come to terms with a longstanding psychological trauma.
First of all, it became known that the husband of Putin's daughter owned a large part of Gazprom.
The little-known tabloid Sobesednik reported that Lyudmila Putina married for the second time and changed her surname.
On January 31, 2016, the independent magazine The New Times published an article about Putin's eldest daughter Maria.
The text was about her Dutch husband Jorrit Faassen, who worked at Gazprom, their job and their luxurious life.
Sources in Putin's inner circle said at the time that the text about Maria upset him, especially such details as the publication of her address and a photo of her house.
The former KGB officer saw something extremely malicious and dangerous in this.
During the year, "RBC" and "The New Times" ran into all sorts of trouble.
were seeking companies that the "RBC" -Eigentümer Mikhail Prokhorov belong.
As the banker Lebedev before him, he took matters into his own hands: he dismissed the chief and all the important people of his publication.
And the "New Times" has been sentenced by the court to an absurdly high fine.
This punishment was obviously there to destroy the magazine - but with the help of crowdfunding succeeded the editors to raise the required amount in four days.
Only later but was set anyway.
Virtually all traditional media in Russia have been shut down over the past decade.
Recent publications have resembled guerrilla operations: Many Russian investigative journalists reported online and set up small investigative websites.
In the past two years it has become known that Putin may have had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter, that his two legitimate daughters were divorced and then remarried.
Each time, these investigations have been accompanied by unbelievable details about how much money Putin's female relatives received, how they used budgetary funds, and how those close to them got their hands on former state property.
State media have even interviewed Putin's daughters - but they were never asked any meaningful questions.
The eldest daughter is said to be doing propaganda in a WhatsApp group at her former university
The opportunity to look into the soul of the president's eldest daughter arose just last week when Russian journalist Dmitri Kolezev published screenshots from a chat room of graduates of Moscow University's medical faculty.
More than 170 people take part in the correspondence, and Maria V (acquaintances claim it is Maria Vorontsova - the name by which Putin's eldest daughter is known) is particularly active.
She speaks out on all political issues and says exactly the same thing as the Russian propaganda channels.
“Nobody in the West wants our country to prosper.
Everything has always been done to prevent this.
And she will continue to do so,” writes Maria V. in a chat group for former students.
However, all related to the Kremlin sources assure us that there is no close communication between Putin and his daughters.
Enjoy all the benefits of course the endless Russian corruption, they have access to state property and budget funds - in this they are no different from a large group of children of Russian top official, Putin's associates.
Dmitry Patrushev, the son of the secretary of the Security Council and former director of the FSB, is agriculture minister.
The son of presidential advisor and former Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Sergei Ivanov jr., Manages the state diamond mining company Alrosa.
The son of former prime minister and former chief of foreign intelligence, Mikhail Fradkov, is head of Promsvyazbank, a state bank,
providing services to the defense industry.
There are many such examples.
In comparison, the positions of Putin's daughters are very modest.
But even better protected than the details of the President's private (and not very private) life are those of his intellectual life, his thinking.
What drives Putin's personal motives and what drives him to treat the victims of the war in Ukraine without pity and compassion is arguably Russia's best-kept secret.