| Lyudmila Putina | |
|---|---|
| Lyudmila Putina in 2007 | |
| First Lady of Russia | |
| In office 7 May 2000 – 7 May 2008 |
|
| Preceded by | Naina Yeltsina |
| Succeeded by | Svetlana Medvedeva |
| Personal details | |
| Born | January 6, 1958 Kaliningrad, Soviet Union |
| Spouse(s) | Vladimir Putin |
| Children | 2 (Mariya and Yekaterina) |
| Religion | Russian Orthodox |
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Putina (Russian: Людмила Александровна Путина, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Putina, née Shkrebneva, Шкребнева; born January 6, 1958, Kaliningrad, Soviet Union) is the wife of former Russian President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
She married Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin on July 28, 1983; they have two daughters, Maria, born 1985 and Yekaterina (Katja) (born 1986 in Dresden). The daughters attended the German School in Moscow (Deutsche Schule Moskau) until Putin's appointment as Prime Minister in 1999.
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In her early years she was a flight attendant for the Kaliningrad branch of Aeroflot. In 1986 Putina graduated from the Branch of Spanish language and philology of the Department of Philology of Leningrad State University, where in 1990–1994 she in turn taught German. For a few years until 1999 she was a Moscow representative of the JSC Telecominvest.[1][2][3]
Following tradition, Putina maintains a low profile on the Russian political stage, generally avoiding the limelight except as required by protocol and restricting her public role to supportive statements about her husband.
Putina is a curator of a fund aimed to develop the Russian language and sometimes produces statements concerning Russian language and education. Her preference for "maintaining and preserving"[4] the Russian language has led her to make public statements against orthographic reform. The Russian Academy of Science sponsored a commission to study the orthography of the Russian language and propose reforms. Their recommendations were made public in 2002 after eight years of work, but were subsequently shot down by Putina, who used Russia's burgeoning economy as one of her reasons why the orthographic reform was not just unnecessary but untimely. However, although one newspaper in Moscow accused "Lyudmila Putina de facto cancelled any attempts to reform spelling," the fact remains that public and academic reaction to the reforms were sufficiently negative to have that particular reform attempt abandoned.[5]
In 1993 in Kaliningrad she was involved in a life-threatening car accident and was seriously injured. After this she converted to the Orthodox faith.