Russian President Plagiarized Ph.D. Thesis

There is an interesting story in The Australian today reporting that Vladimir Putin not only plagiarized his economics thesis, “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations,” from two American economists at the University of Pittsburgh, but would not have earned the Ph.D in economics he claims to have even if he had written it:

A new study of an economics thesis written by Mr Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.

Mr Putin was labelled a plagiarist at the weekend after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the President’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978.

According to the Kremlin’s official biography, Mr Putin, 53, obtained a PhD in economics from the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997. But the US researchers also established that his thesis was for a lesser degree that would not have entitled him to a full doctorate.

The embarrassing revelation that the former KGB agent may have cheated and lied about his qualifications follows a long search by US scholars for evidence of the President’s academic prowess. A copy of the thesis was eventually found in the electronic files of a Moscow technical library.

According to Clifford G. Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Mr Putin’s work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s.

It will be interesting to see how widely reported the story will be in the U.S. press. Though plagiarism is the least of Putin’s many sins — undermining whatever democracy existed in Russia is far worse — who can forget Bush’s classic defense of Putin in 2001: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy… I was able to get a sense of his soul”?

Hat-tip: Daily Kos.