An uncommon job in Russia.  Tracing Putin's family roots for a monthly salary

 A Russian university has announced an academic job aimed at tracing President Vladimir Putin's family tree and studying the history of his ancestors, his family roots, and the history of his ancestors during the last decades of the Tsarist era.

The project comes in a country where the history of leaders is of great political and academic interest, and the researcher who will take on the task faces the challenge of the limited records available on the families of Russian peasants from which the Russian president's family hails.

The Origins of the Putin Family

The Russian State University of Humanities, one of Russia's most prominent universities and the largest specialized university of its kind in the country, has announced that it needs a research fellow to study the biographies of Putin's ancestors, for a monthly salary of 81,990 rubles, equivalent to about 850 pounds.

According to the job posting, the position does not include any bonuses or additional compensation, but the selected candidate will be entitled to annual leave.

The research project is titled: "A Collective Biography of Putin Family Members in Post-Reformed Russia (1861-1917): The Transition from Agriculture to Small Urban Entrepreneurship."

The project is scheduled to run until July 2027, with applications closing on June 10.

A daunting research task

According to the British newspaper "The Telegraph", the task may not be easy even for the most patriotic Russian researcher or even the most dedicated researcher.

In May, historian Mikhail Gershon told Russia's state news agency TASS that archival records of Putin's ancestors were likely to be limited, given that the family belonged to the peasant class.

Gershzon recently found evidence suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin's grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovich Putin, was baptized in 1879 in Dodino, a rural area northwest of Moscow.

Putin's grandfather between Lenin and Stalin

Spiridon Putin worked as a personal chef for Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, before later preparing food for Joseph Stalin.

According to previously published biographies, his culinary skills were so widely known that on one occasion he received a golden ruble from Grigory Rasputin, a Russian peasant and mystic who gained considerable influence in the last imperial dynasty to rule Russia.

"The simplest type of family"

Putin has long spoken about his family's roots in interviews and public statements.

The Russian president described his ancestors as belonging to "the simplest type of family" and repeatedly told stories about his grandfather and various tales about his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, during the war years.

Putin came under suspicion in 2012 after telling former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that his father had returned home during the siege of Leningrad and found his mother among "a pile of bodies piled up in the street" and miraculously managed to save her life.

But Putin gave a different account in a previously published autobiography, stating that his father remained in combat throughout the siege and that he "did not have the opportunity to look for" his wife in Leningrad.

Russian President's Family

Born in 1952, Putin was the youngest of three children to a factory mother and a father who served in the Soviet Navy.

The Russian president has two daughters with his ex-wife, Lyudmila Alexandrovna Shreibneva.