Word: volodya
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...army with multiple shrapnel wounds. He was a late child, born when his mother was 41 years old. His two brothers died young, one shortly after birth, the other of diphtheria during World War II. Although Vladimir Sr. was party secretary at the train-car factory where he worked, Volodya's mother had him secretly baptized in the Russian Orthodox faith. He grew up in one of the Soviet Union's cramped communal apartments, with no hot water, a frigid common toilet, plenty of kitchen quarrels and the occasional...
...schoolboy Putin too who first conceived of a career in the KGB. Tamara Stelmakova, now 70, still teaches at School 281, the secondary school specializing in chemistry that Volodya attended at 14. She remembers an ordinary boy who stood out mainly for his "beautiful" reports on "political information" in the mandatory Marxist ideology class. Volodya, she recalls, was "always speaking as if he knew what he was talking about," mesmerizing his audience with his smooth delivery. She recalls him as a well-mannered student with poor grades in chemistry, good grades in history and German, and "always...
...recruits were fit and tough, and sometimes edging dangerously close to trouble with the law. "The saying used to be," Ivan recalls, "that you went either into the Spetsnaz or into prison." They had something else in common, veterans say: though often unsophisticated, they were usually very bright. Volodya, a well-educated officer who commanded a Spetsnaz unit, remembers his men as "some of the most intelligent people I have ever known...
...that might entail them, but he loved to be in the thick of things and loved making public speeches." What he did have was the gift of gab. "Boy, could he talk!" says another colleague. "Whenever he stood up, there was a whisper in the audience: 'Now Volodya is going to show 'em!' The only problem was that he could never offer a reasonable solution...
...kicked out because their parents can't or don't want to take care of them. Some children fall into prostitution through abduction or trickery. Easy prey, they become chattel for the sex merchants. Sasha says Marik was sold to him for a case of vodka, while he found Volodya abandoned at the Moscow railway station -- together with thousands of other youngsters who have turned the terminal into a street urchin's paradise. Once victimized by the violent gangsters and pimps who control the sex trade, most children end up addicted to alcohol or drugs. Despair is the norm; suicide...