In 2010−2011, Vladimir Putin, then Prime Minister of Russia, dated Alisa Kharcheva, an applicant to the journalism department of Moscow State University. Putin learned about her thanks to an erotic calendar published in collaboration with the Nashi movement for his birthday. At the beginning of this romance, the girl was only 17 years old. The people who arranged this acquaintance tried to use their relationship to influence the head of government.
This story is covered in the book Tsar in Person by Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin. Proekt will share more details about it as part of a big study on connections among Russia’s top brass called Fathers and Grandfathers, which will be published this fall.
Details. The authors of the book spoke at different times with four people involved in Putin’s relationship with Kharcheva. According to their interlocutors, the romance began in the fall of 2010 and lasted about a year. During this time, Kharcheva regularly visited Putin’s residence outside Moscow (probably Novo-Ogaryovo).
- The acquaintance was arranged by people associated with the Nashi movement. On Putin’s 58th birthday, October 7, 2010, Nashi spokeswoman Kristina Potupchik published a calendar featuring 12 semi-nude girls. Most of them were students at the Moscow State University journalism faculty, and only 17-year-old Kharcheva, whose photo was featured on the April page, was an applicant who had failed to enter the university that year. The calendar was given to Putin along with the contact details of all the girls, and the prime minister’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, publicly confirmed that he had received it. Further developments have not been publicly disclosed until now.
- According to the authors’ sources, Putin looked through the calendar and expressed a desire to meet Kharcheva in particular. Within a month after that, the girl received a call from the Parliament with an offer to meet with the head of government, one of the participants in this story states.
- The organizers of the meeting tried to use this affair to influence Putin. «Nashi» would prepare the girl before each of her visits to the Prime Minister, telling her their ideas and requests for Putin. However, the authors’ sources do not recall the Prime Minister ever accepting any of these ideas.
- Several people were involved in this affair. The authors of the erotic calendar were named as Vladimir Tabak and Maxim Perlin, graduates of the MSU journalism department. The idea to give it to Putin was agreed in advance with the curators of Nashi — Vasily Yakemenko, the movement’s founder and head of Rosmolodezh, and Vladislav Surkov, First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration.
- Putin’s relationship with Kharcheva ended about a year later. Coincidentally, at the same time, Nashi lost the trust of the authorities because they were unable to counter the mass protests against election fraud and Putin’s return to the presidency that had begun in Russia. As a result, Yakemenko and Surkov lost their posts.
- Alisa, on the other hand, received many gifts from Putin. First, in 2015 (as previously reported by Reuters), she was given a luxury apartment in downtown Moscow by Grigory Baevsky — a man connected to the president’s friend Arkady Rotenberg who has given gifts to other women associated with Putin, including Alina Kabaeva. Second, Alisa became a student at MGIMO — according to one of our sources, her acceptance was pre-arranged.
- Third, the girl’s father began to receive a kind of payoff for his daughter. In 2020, Vsevolod Kharchev was hired by the pro-Kremlin propaganda organization ANO Dialog, which is headed by Vladimir Tabak, the author of the erotic calendar. Considering that Kharchev is a former professional hockey player, it is unlikely that he had the necessary skills to work in this organization. The book’s authors obtained information about Kharchev’s work thanks to a leak of Dialog’s financial reports, which show that in recent years, the girl’s father has been receiving about 100,000 rubles per month.
- Kharcheva now goes by her husband’s surname, Akhilgova. She owns a tanning studio in Moscow. In addition, she is still in touch with her «pimps.» According to border crossing records, Akhilgova flew to Turkey at least once in 2021 on a business jet in the company of Kristina Potupchik.
Context. The «Nashi» movement was founded under the brand name «Walking Together» in 2000 and received its current name five years later. Its founder was Vasily Yakemenko, who was appointed head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs in 2008. After the 2011 protests, Yakeymenko was dismissed and no longer held any official positions. He recently gave a lengthy interview in which he admitted that while leading the youth movement, he managed to earn a lot of money, even though he was not really interested in politics. «I was busy courting women,» he said.
The story of Alisa Kharcheva, based on the book Tsar in Person, is also being published today by the German newspaper Bild.
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