Internet users are discussing a book with a controversial title, allegedly written by the Russian president. We checked whether Vladimir Putin really published such a work.

Mentions of Putin’s book “My Struggle” can be found on social networks “VKontakte", Twitter, LiveJournal And Facebook. Typically, such publications are accompanied by a cover photo showing the Russian president in a kimono during a fight (Putin’s long-time passion for judo is well known). One of the site users Reddit he even claimed that his son allegedly took such a book from the library.

A photo of the book “My Struggle,” allegedly written by Vladimir Putin, began to be widely circulated on the Internet after tweet opposition Russian politician, former State Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov (473,000 views, 4,283 likes and 810 retweets at the time of writing this analysis). In his post, Gudkov placed a photo of Putin’s book next to the cover of Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf”(German: “My Struggle”), which describes the key ideas of Nazism.

However, we were unable to find a book with the title “My Struggle” authored by Putin either in large online bookstores or on the Ozon, Wildberries or Yandex.Market marketplaces. There is also not a single mention of this publication in the Russian media. Judging by messages media and catalogs bookstores, Putin took part in writing three books. All three are training aids for judokas: “Judo. History, theory, practice"(2000), "Learning judo with Vladimir Putin" (2002) and "The art of judo. From play to mastery"(2015).

Book cover "Learning judo with Vladimir Putin"(2002)

The only advertisement for the sale of Putin’s book “My Struggle” that we were able to find was published in the VKontakte community “We are for Putin | Patriots of Russia" After some time the book disappeared from list goods offered for sale. According to the archived version of the page, a copy cost 750 rubles; the same price was indicated in Gennady Gudkov’s tweet. It is not known for certain why such an advertisement appeared in this pro-government group and why it was soon removed. At the time of publication of this analysis, the group administrators did not respond to the “Verified” request.

Both Gennady Gudkov’s tweet and other publications on social networks (including the sale announcement on VKontakte) used the same photograph of the book. We were unable to find any other images of this print.

Russian pro-government information project "Noodles"discovered that back in 2004, a visitor to the Svalko.org forum jokingly published This is an image tagged “phototoad”. Since then, the “cover” has appeared several more times online. For example, in 2020, Twitter user YuraYakunin wrote a humorous tweet: “Roskomnadzor has banned the sale of Putin’s book “My Struggle” in German translation in Russia.” And in May 2022, the humorous community "Pussy", which makes up satirical news headlines, wrote: ""My Struggle." Putin published a book about judo.”

Thus, there is not a single confirmation that the President of the Russian Federation ever published a book called “My Struggle”, and statements to the contrary are based on a single image - a comic picture that, apparently, first appeared on one of the Russian forums in 2004. Nineteen years later, politician Gennady Gudkov published it on his Twitter, either by mistake or deliberately passing off the cover as the real one.

Cover image: Twitter