Early Years
He was born to Zinaida Antonovna Surkova, his mother (b. 1935), and his father Andarbek (Yuriy) Danil'bekovich Dudayev, both of whom were school teachers in Duba-yurt, Checheno-Ingush SSR, as Aslambek Dudayev. It is not until 1969 that his name was officially changed to Vladislav Surkov after moving with his mother to the Ryazan region shortly after his family had been abandoned by his father.
Having completed his secondary school studies, Surkov entered Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys in 1982, where he made a friend of Vladimir Solovyov, now a leading pro-government TV journalist, and Mikhail Fridman, now an oil tycoon, but failed to graduate as he had been conscripted into the military service, which around that time had become compulsory in USSR even for students. He served from 1983 – 1985 in a Soviet artillery regiment in Hungary, according to his official biography, or, as the former Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov claimed in a TV interview on 12 November 2006, in the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU).
After his military training Surkov was accepted to Moscow Institute of Culture for a five-year program in theater direction, but spent only three years there. Surkov graduated from Moscow International University with a master's degree in economics long after that in the late 1990s.
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