Vladislav Surkov - Private Issues

Private Issues

Besides his political and business activities, he has been engaged in song composition and is the author of some recent texts of the Russian rock group Agata Kristi.

Surkov speaks English. Data on his private life is controversial. He was married to Yulia Vishnevskaya, the sister of Anatoly Chubais's wife. Vishnevskaya holds a renowned puppet collection. Surkov and Vishnevskaya have a son, Artyom, who either lives in London with his mother or is a student of the Moscow State University, according to different sources.

Surkov married a second time in a civil ceremony in 1998 to Natalya Dubovitskaya, a former employee of Menatep bank. Mr Surkov and Natalya Dubovitskaya have two children.

In June 2005 it became public for the first time after an interview with him was published in the German Der Spiegel magazine that his father was an ethnic Chechen and he spent the first five years of his life in Chechnya in Duba-yurt and Grozny. The remark, meaning that he knew his place, was apparently made to sidestep dangerous speculations he had presidential ambitions. Follow-up articles published in Russian newspapers ( ) said that his father's name was Andarbek Dudayev (though not closely related to Dzhokhar Dudayev). Surkov's birth name was Aslambek Dudayev, born in Shali. After his parents separated, his mother moved to Lipetsk and changed his name to the Russified version — Vladislav Surkov. His official biography still lists Surkov as name and Solntsevo village of Lipetsk province as birthplace.

Mr Surkov claimed that he earned 3.89 million rubles ($115,000) in 2008. According to public records, his wife, Ms Dubovitskaya earned 16.8 million rubles ($497,000).

Surkov reportedly has portraits of Argentine-born revolutionary Che Guevara and American rapper Tupac Shakur next to one of Putin in his Kremlin office and is fond of poets such as Allen Ginsberg of the Beat Generation.

Surkov wrote the preface to the 2009 pseudonymous bestselling satirical novel Almost Zero. The author was "Natan Dubovitsky", readable as a male form of his wife's name. Conflicting statements in the preface added to speculation that Surkov was the author of the novel. Proceeding on that assumption, The Economist said the novel "expos the vices of the system he himself had created". A successful stage adaptation of the novel (sometimes translated as Nearby Zero) has been presented by Kirill Serebrennikov.