Sure, it’s barely at the outskirts of our publishing news mandate, but when the president of Russia gets caught plagiarising on his master’s thesis, I can’t help but bring it up. According to Brooking Institution research reported in the Pittsburgh Review-Tribune, “Putin copied significant chunks of a 1978 textbook by Pitt professors William R. King and David I. Cleland and passed it off as his own.” I guess we can look forward to first editions of Strategic Planning and Policy popping up on eBay any day now… The professors, who don’t even hold the copyright on the book, are taking the news in good stride. “Maybe I should offer to become president of Russia,” King quips, “but I don’t really want to live in Moscow.”
So far, the defense out of Russia is pretty laughable. According to The Moscow Times, “it was unclear…whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the mid-1990s.” (This line of reasoning was also invoked in the story’s most significant U.S. media hit, a Washington Times article published last Friday.)