At the end of the 2000s, the Internet was blown up by an archival photograph depicting Ronald Reagan in the Soviet capital in May 1988. According to the media, the future president of Russia can be seen on the left side of the photo. Let's check if this is true.

The source of the sensation was interview, which was given to the American National Public Radio in January 2009 by Pete Souza, the official photographer of the White House under Reagan and Obama. Sousa accompanied the 40th President of the United States during his official visit to the USSR in 1988. According to the photographer, while walking along Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan met a group of tourists who bombarded the American with tricky questions about human rights in the United States. Souza did not believe then that ordinary tourists could be so savvy, and later an intelligence officer confirmed his guess: these were KGB agents with their families.

Souza added that he has a photograph of this episode in his archives. And what’s most interesting is that one of the “tourists” in the picture, a blond man with a camera around his neck, is none other than Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, then still an ordinary KGB agent. According to Souza, other people prompted him to make this discovery, and it was confirmed.

Let's try to verify this statement from several angles. First, let's turn to the official biographies President of Russia:

“In 1985–1990, Vladimir Putin worked in the GDR. He served at the territorial reconnaissance point in Dresden. Due to his length of service, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and senior assistant to the head of the department. And in 1989 he was awarded a bronze medal "For outstanding services to the National People's Army of the GDR."

It turns out that in order to play the role of an inquisitive tourist, the 35-year-old intelligence agent would have to interrupt an important foreign mission and, as a result, appear in numerous photographs.

Secondly, let's evaluate the similarity of the man in the photo with other portraits of Putin from that time.

As we can see, in the photograph taken no later than 1984 (this year Putin was already a major, and here he has the shoulder straps of a captain), the future president clearly does not have as rich a head of hair as the mysterious man in the 1988 photograph. The difference is even more clearly visible in the 1985 photo. In addition, the difference in the shape of the nose and lips is striking.

Russian political analyst and author of books about Putin Andrei Piontkovsky believes such a discovery is “nonsense” and does not believe in its truth. According to unconfirmed reports, a similar opinion (“It’s not him”) was expressed by the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov.

And finally, let’s turn again to the author of the sensation, Pete Souza, only from 2017. Here is an excerpt from his interview with Esquire magazine:

“No, I'm not sure. This photograph was included in a book I wrote after the Reagan presidency. Ten years later, I received an email from a man who seemed to know something about history. He explained why it was Putin. This never occurred to me when I published the book. Putin wasn’t in these parts then, right? But this guy made a good argument that it was him: we knew for sure that the so-called “tourists” were KGB agents with families.

I became interested, and I contacted the Reagan Library, as well as the National Security Council at the White House. <…> The Reagan library could not give a confident answer; they did not know how to check it. Someone from the National Security Council told me, "It could be him, but we're not sure."

I was doing an interview with NPR in 2009 and this topic came up. And due to my mistake, it sounded as if I was sure: this is Vladimir Putin, when in fact there was no concrete evidence. So I don't know. This is still a mystery to me. But the Russians deny that it is him.”

Thus, there is not a single convincing evidence to support the sensational find. It is almost certain that the person in the photo is not Vladimir Putin.