When Vladimir Putin proposed
to his first wife, it turned out to be a disaster. His style of proposing to
his first wife, Lyudmila Shkrebneva, made her think that he was trying to dump
her instead.

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Shkrebneva recounted the
story of Putin’s bizarre proposal in “First Person,” a biography that was
published in 2000. It contains interviews of many people who saw and knew the
Russian leader closely.

“You know what kind of
person I am by now,” Putin told Shrebneva after they had been dating for nearly
four years in 1983. “In general, I’m not easygoing. In three and a half years,
you have probably made up your mind.”

When Putin proposed
Shkrebneva he was working with the KGB, the Soviet Union’s much-feared secret
police. His main job, before being sent to East Germany two years later, was to
monitor foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad.

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For Shrebneva, “it sounded
like we were breaking up.” When she told him that she had made up her mind, “he
let out a doubtful ‘Yes?’”

Poorly dressed man

She also admitted that she
“didn’t think much” of the poorly dressed man she had met at a theatre on a
double date in the late 1970s. But they kept in touch after the notoriously
secretive Putin gave her his phone number.

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The couple had two
daughters, Mariya and Yekaterina, before divorcing in a staged television
interview in 2013.

The divorce was confirmed
when her name was later removed from Putin’s official biography on the
Kremlin’s website.

Shrebneva was educated as a
linguist. In 1986, Lyudmila graduated from the branch of Spanish language and
philology of the Department of Philology of Leningrad State University.

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Who is Lyudmila Shkrebneva?

She started her career as a
flight attendant for the Kaliningrad branch of Aeroflot. She met Vladimir Putin
in Leningrad and they married on 28 July 1983.

From 1990 to 1994, Shrebneva
taught German at the Department of Philology of Leningrad State University. For
a few years before Vladimir was appointed Prime Minister of Russia in August
1999, she was a Moscow representative of the company Telecominvest from 1998 to
1999 where she, as the only employee in the Moscow office, answered phone calls
and organized meetings.

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After Vladimir’s rise to
political power, she maintained a low profile on the Russian political stage,
generally avoiding the limelight except as required by the protocol and
restricting her public role to supportive statements about her husband.

After she became First Lady,
she was known as Lyudmila Putina. She created a fund that aimed to develop the
Russian language and sometimes produced statements concerning the Russian
language and education.

Her preference for
“maintaining and preserving” the Russian language 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 changes.

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Their recommendations were made public in 2002 after eight
years of work but were subsequently rejected 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
alleged that “Lyudmila Putin de facto cancelled any attempts to reform
spelling,” the fact remains that public and academic reaction to the
reforms was sufficiently negative to have that particular reform attempt
abandoned.

On 6 June 2013, she and
Putin publicly announced the termination of their marriage based on a mutual
decision. The divorce announcement was made on camera for the Russian news
media at the State Kremlin Palace during the intermission of a performance by
the Kremlin Ballet, ending years of speculation about their relationship. In
April 2014, the Kremlin confirmed that their divorce had been finalized.

In January 2016, Lyudmila
was reported to have married Artur Ocheretny in early 2015.