Putin Can’t Keep His Private Life Private

Vladimir Putin would like you to know that he plays hockey. Before he invaded Ukraine, Russia’s 71-year-old president regularly competed in public exhibitions with professional athletes (whose job was clearly to let him score). He insists that the war hasn’t kept him from playing privately, even though it’s required subbing out athletes for bodyguards.

Putin would also like Alina Kabaeva to know that he plays hockey. A former gymnast, Kabaeva has been rumored to be Putin’s romantic partner for more than a decade; their relationship is an open secret in Russia. But according to a recent investigation published by the Dossier Center, a Russian opposition media group, the couple take extra precautions when Putin invites her to his rink: She watches him play from a separate box, out of sight of Putin’s staff, hidden behind smoked glass.

Putin will broadcast anything from his personal life that burnishes his image as a strongman. (Hockey is one of many athletic exploits that he brags about.) But he zealously guards everything else, even if it means concealing a woman in a box.

The report from the Dossier Center, which is financed by the exiled businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, describes in detail the sheltered lives of Putin, Kabaeva, and their purported kids, whose existence Putin has long denied. Even the children he’s willing to acknowledge publicly—the two daughters he had with his ex-wife—live under assumed names. But in recent years, journalists and activists have obtained unprecedented access to Putin’s inner circle, a massive failure on the part of his security services.

[Read: That time I was a Russian propagandist]

The private lives of Russian and Soviet leaders have almost always spilled into public view, becoming subjects of study for historians or grist for national mockery. But they can usually keep their secrets at least until they leave office. Putin hasn’t been so lucky.

Kabaeva was once known as Russia’s “Golden Girl.” Walk around Moscow and you’ll still find posters celebrating her 2004 Olympic gold medal. But now, at age 41, she lives almost entirely in Putin’s shadow, reportedly residing in his palace in the freezing northern town of Valdai. A pop song named after her includes the line, “she is dancing there, behind a little invisible door.” It’s the same door that hides nearly everyone in Putin’s orbit.

“Kabaeva must have thought she would become a queen, but turned out a prisoner,” Nina Khrushcheva, an international-affairs professor at the New School, in New York, told me. “This is the Kremlin’s tragedy.”

The author of the Dossier Center report, Ilya Rozhdestvensky, described to me the “surreal” schemes that Putin has in place to protect his personal life. Guests have to quarantine before seeing him or his family, sometimes for weeks, and his children are moved around the palace grounds only by car. “But at the same time,” Rozhdestvensky said, “there are many signs of security negligence: People can sneak into the residence with cellphones.” He told me that he and his team managed to corroborate some of their reporting with photos of Putin’s sons that had been posted on social media by his own employees and guests.

The president’s obsession with privacy might be explained in part by how much Russians now know about the personal life of his favorite dictator, Joseph Stalin. Entire movies and documentaries have been made about Stalin’s ill-fated wife, Nadezhda. One night at dinner, Stalin was flirting with another woman by rolling bread into little balls and throwing them into her cleavage. When Nadezhda noticed, he rolled a ball of tobacco and threw it at her face. The next morning, she was found dead in her bed with gunshot wounds. The official cause of death was suicide.

As with Stalin, many artists have portrayed Putin in their work. But they’ve largely avoided the president’s personal life. Erika Sheffer, who wrote a play called Vladimir that premiered this month in New York, told me that Putin struck her as “not particularly complicated—petty, self-interested, determined to retain power and amass money.” Her play depicts several major political events during Putin’s tenure while steering clear of his private life. “Great drama requires complexity and contradiction. It requires humanity, and I don’t see that in him.”

Mikhail Gorbachev was the rare case of a Soviet leader whose private life endeared him to the public. In Moscow in 2021, at one of the final rehearsals of a play about him and his wife, Raisa, he was in the audience to hear the standing ovation. Raisa Gorbacheva was the Kremlin’s only truly public first lady. Many Russians loved her—a fact Putin seems not to have grasped. “Putin thinks that Gorbachev’s beautiful, strong, and active wife, Raisa, was hated by ordinary people,” Maria Morina, a Russian filmmaker, told me. “He does not want Kabaeva to be the focus of gossip.”

That fear isn’t completely unfounded. Gossip about Kabaeva erupted in 2008, when a recently opened newspaper, the Moscow Correspondent, published an article asserting that Putin was preparing to marry her at a royal palace in St. Petersburg. Putin denied the report, denouncing its authors and their “erotic fantasies.” The paper closed soon after, a signal to Russia’s journalists that Putin’s personal life was off-limits.

[Gal Beckerman: Five tiny pieces of paper]

But secrets kept coming out. The opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison earlier this year, founded an online outlet that has reported on real estate that Putin seems to have purchased for Kabaeva’s family. Three years ago, Navalny released a video investigation into Putin’s purported Black Sea estate, which has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube. Last year, his team published a report that included records of Putin’s and Kabaeva’s matching itineraries. Journalists at independent Russian outlets such as Dossier, Project Media, Meduza, The Insider, and others have continued to probe the relationship. Some found a private railroad that Kabaeva reportedly uses to travel to and from Putin’s palace in Valdai.

Exactly how many children the couple have is unclear. Some say two, others three. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Kabaeva gave birth to one of them in Switzerland in 2015. According to Dossier, that child was a boy named Ivan, now 9 years old. He likes playing chess online, Rozhdestvensky told me, which suggests that he may have access to the outside world. Wi-Fi could be a mixed blessing for Ivan. The internet is a big place. It includes the International Criminal Court’s warrant for his father’s arrest. It also includes allegations that his father has stolen Ukrainian children.

Rozhdestvensky called his investigation “Succession,” after the television series about children fighting over their father’s empire. I asked Timur Olevsky, the editor of The Insider, what that fight might look like among Putin’s multiple sets of children. “Russia will probably suffer from decades of conflicts, like the War of Roses,” he told me, only half-kidding. “For now, Putin’s kids will continue to live as recluses in a golden cage.”