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Washington Profile
www.washprofile.org
March 31, 2006
‘It All Boils Down to Plagiarism’ [re: Putin dissertation]

An interview with Brookings Senior Fellow Clifford Gaddy

At a panel discussion held on March 24 in Washington, D.C., Dr. Gaddy said approximately 16 pages of Putin’s dissertation were taken almost verbatim from the Russian translation of William King and David Cleland's 1978 book "Strategic Planning and Policy."

Washington Profile: Could you speak a bit about how you became involved in investigating Putin’s dissertation in the first place?

Clifford Gaddy: I’m an economist and have done a lot of work, and continue to do a lot of work, on specifically the resource industries – oil, gas and other resources – of the Russian economy. I’ve written several articles that stress how important that sector is for the current boom in the Russian economy. And one of the big issues that I think needs to be addressed is the sustainability of the resource-based boom. That of course is a question of what is being done to invest in the future of the oil and gas industries and make it possible to continue producing enough oil and gas to keep this all going. In the Russian discussion, this is usually described as the question of the reproduction of the raw material base, or the reproduction of the resource base. It’s being debated right now, and in that context, I found it very interesting that, as most people know who study Russia, President Putin wrote a dissertation for his Candidate of Economics degree, and the title of that was exactly “The Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Resource Base,” a case study in St. Petersburg and Moscow. I thought it would be important to see what he said about that, given that right now there is something of a split in the top circles of the Kremlin and around the Kremlin and in the government about these key issues of debate….So that was the reason to look at this dissertation.

However, people reported that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get hold of the dissertation. The first thing I wanted to do was see what other people had written about its content. In looking at all these things, you found that nobody seems to have read it. I could find no single source that could authoritatively say that they had read the dissertation and reported on its contents. There was some confusion, because a number of people have read, and some have actually written about, an article that was published by Putin in the journal of the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. But this was an article, and typically was described as ‘based on the dissertation.’ But, again, that’s interesting, and by the way the article is interesting, but that’s not the dissertation. So the question remained: what’s in the dissertation? It was at that point that you begin looking for references to it and reports about it, that you start to stumble across the mystery. On [President Putin’s official] website, both in English and in Russian, Putin is described as having a degree in economics, in Russian, Kandidat ekonomicheskikh nauk, and on the English version it says he has a ‘PhD in economics.’ In the biographical book of interviews, Ot pervogo litsa (First Person in the English translation), there’s no mention whatsoever of his degree or dissertation or circumstances surrounding it, which is a little bit curious. It does talk about his undergraduate education, law degree and so forth…

Washington Profile: How did you come about this information?

Gaddy: To make a long story short, obviously there’s no evidence that anyone has ever read it. And, by the way, there was contradictory information… biographers saying the dissertation itself is inaccessible, classified; it’s off limits. One source said it’s not available to mortals. The Washington Post reporter David Hoffman, who wrote a biography of Putin, describes how he did see a copy of the dissertation when he was in St. Petersburg Mining Institute Rector Vladimir Litvinenko’s office. He was allowed to flip through it. But at one point it was taken away from him and put back on the shelf; so he was able to see the contents, more or less, but clearly not able to read it either. And other people have said they’ve never seen it. At the same time, Mr. Litvinenko himself interviewed one time, said: ‘It’s accessible to everyone. It’s in the depository of dissertations at the State Library’, the former Lenin Library. A colleague of mine went online, typed in the name of the dissertation at the library website and indeed came up with a number. He couldn’t access it online, but he did have the classification number. So he picked up the telephone, called a friend in Moscow -- not a scholar, not a researcher, not anyone in particular, just someone who happened to be physically in Moscow -- and asked him if he couldn’t go down to the library, check out the copy of the dissertation (‘here’s the classification code you need’) and make a photo copy. Well, that’s exactly what he did…He was not even a subscriber to the library; he needed to pay the fee to become a subscriber. He’d never been in there before, but all he needed was the code, and he went and, sure enough, he got the copy, made photo copies, scanned them in, and we had it. And that’s all there was to it… I can only say that all these journalists and biographers have been incredibly sloppy and lazy for having failed to do this before. I just don’t know why none of them ever managed to do this. In any event, once we had it, we could read it…

Washington Profile: And your impression of the content?

Gaddy: Reading the document… it’s quite boring. There’s nothing of particular interest in it in terms of ideas. One usually thinks of a dissertation having some original idea, a thesis, or something that’s being defended, investigated…there was nothing being investigated here, there was no question that needed to be answered; there was nothing like that…It looked like it came out of government manuals; it was lists of raw materials, and how many tons, or kilos there might be of all these different things. There was a very standard exercise to calculate cost-benefit analysis of an investment project in a small company in Leningrad Oblast, and then there was a bigger section, a scheme for transportation and port infrastructure, but again nothing very interesting… with one exception. There was one part, maybe twenty, twenty-five pages, in the second chapter of the dissertation, the chapter that was going to describe strategic planning. And this, at least, seemed like something that had some real ideas to it. It defined strategic planning in a different way than one ordinarily thinks of it being long-range planning; it’s not central planning of the old Communist variety, it’s not just purely long-range planning; there’s something very different about strategic planning…and it was all fairly well developed, compressed but well developed. At the same time that it was the most interesting part, it was very clear to me, it was a very different style. In fact, the whole dissertation seemed to be of varying styles. For someone who’s graded term papers and been on dissertation committees, you can recognize when something doesn’t look right in terms of being original work. What you could see is that what I considered to be this interesting discussion about strategic planning was based on one single source; there’s only one source referenced. There’s a bibliography in the dissertation that contains 47 works in all, and one of these was the one that was used. It was a book published in Russian by Progress Publishers. In other words, it was a translation from some other language, in this case, from English, by David Cleland and William King, two American business school professors from the University of Pittsburgh. So I got a copy of this book and started to read it. It’s a very interesting book, but I could see that…though in the dissertation there are no footnotes to tell us from what page any material comes, in two places there’s a bracketed number, 23, which refers to the King and Cleland book in the bibliography, but there’s no indication where anything comes from. But with enough work you can figure it out: this looks just like what’s in the dissertation, this looks just like what’s in the dissertation… And what’s very striking is that there are a number of figures and diagrams, and those are immediately identifiable as coming out of the King and Cleland book. The next step was to confirm the degree to which things in the dissertation came straight from King and Cleland, so I really needed to see the Russian-language edition of this book. That was another whole process; the Russian version of the book does not exist at any library in the United States, so again, we had to call on the Moscow friend to go back to the library and make some copies from the book. I got those, and then I was able to just lay them out side by side, and with a highlighter start to identify sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, that were identical…

Washington Profile: You can say without a doubt that we are talking about plagiarism?

Gaddy: Absolutely…The dissertation itself has something like 180 pages of text.…About 16 pages of text come straight out of King and Cleland, with no footnotes, no quotation marks, and never in the text are the names King and Cleland ever mentioned. Moreover, this material that comes directly from King and Cleland is from the very first sentence of chapter two, the chapter on strategic planning, taken straight from the book. So there’s no original introduction by Mr. Putin that then gets into this. So clearly the reader assumes these are the thoughts, the ideas of the author of the dissertation. Speaking as a professor, you can’t do this; this is not the way you do it. This is plagiarism. If you want to include this much of a work, which is probably too much under any circumstances, you must put quotation marks around it, you must acknowledge that these authors did all this thinking. These are elementary steps that you must take. But it wasn’t done. So I think this would classify as plagiarism at any university around the world that’s adhering to international standards, commonly accepted standards. It’s definitely plagiarism. The next question of course is: was it intentional plagiarism, or what was it all about? And that’s always the question with plagiarism. In this case, I don’t think it was really intentional in the sense that if you had wanted to hide where the text came from you wouldn’t even list this work in the bibliography. Had they not listed the book in the bibliography, I could never have checked it…I can say for sure that they’ve plagiarized from King and Cleland, but there are another 160 pages whose sources have not been checked at all, or at least I haven’t checked them. I don’t know if they’ve been plagiarized or not. I suspect they might have been, because they’ve been written in a very different style….

Washington Profile: You have said that Putin might not even have written the dissertation himself…

Gaddy: I’m not the only one who says that; many people’s response to this whole discussion about plagiarism is that of course he didn’t write the dissertation at all, so why should we care whether it’s plagiarism or not, because this was one of the many, many, many cases we know of government officials, and including in the Soviet period (it’s not clear whether it was more or less prevalent in the Soviet period), not really earning their degrees, but they were written for them…[The practice] is well known. The only thing that changed after the fall of communism was that rich people, wealthy business people, could now join the list of those who were getting these phony degrees because they could pay money for them…This brings up an interesting point. The St. Petersburg Mining Institute is a very reputable, prestigious institution, and the rector, Mr. Litvinenko -- who was directly involved in the dissertation, allegedly helped [Putin] choose the topic and was more or less the advisor for the dissertation -- is himself a member of the higher accreditation commission, which is the government-appointed body to be the watchdog over standards about degree-granting, dissertations and quality control for higher education in Russia. So it’s extra scandalous that he would be involved in this case of, at minimum, shoddiness and plagiarism, possibly something worse, which would be the literal purchase, either by money or political influence, of a dissertation by someone who didn’t actually do the work. That second point is not clear. I don’t have proof about that. All I have is proof about the plagiarism.

Washington Profile: Given this revelation, how do you believe it will affect relations between Putin and the international community; how will Putin be viewed both internationally and domestically?

Gaddy: Internationally, I doubt that it will have any particular impact. This is not something that typically influences any international relations. Domestically, I don’t know, it’s up to the Russians. Again, some people will say, everybody did it, what’s the big deal? That’s not what we elected him for; we didn’t elect him as a scholar. I can see that argument, there’s a certain pragmatic appeal to that. On the other hand, others will say, this is an example of real hypocrisy because here’s a man who prides himself on his legalism, his adherence to legalities, to a ‘dictatorship of the law’, and he of course wants other people to do the same. Well, he broke the law if he got a degree under false pretexts. Here’s a man who talks about making education a point on the agenda at the G-8 meeting; strange that he himself is so disrespectful of standards and education… I can imagine that people who did do the work to earn their candidate degrees, some of them might be a bit resentful and feel that this is unfair. And of course Putin is someone who always talks about fairness and spravedlivost’ [justice] being the hallmark of the Russian identity. Again, it’s a bit hypocritical to say that and give yourself a degree you didn’t earn. Finally, there is the role of Mr. Litvinenko in this. Mr. Litvinenko, remember, was a campaign manager for Mr. Putin twice, in 2000 and 2004 in St. Petersburg. Mr. Litvinenko is described as having Mr. Putin’s ear, he has influence, he gives advice. Well, that’s an important person in the country, and if in any way his influence with Mr. Putin is based on an exchange of favors – having done him the favor of getting this degree – that’s probably not a good thing either in terms of good governance or transparency...

Washington Profile: To your knowledge, have there ever been similar incidents in other countries?

Gaddy: In the United States there’s an excellent example which shows a similar sort of thing, but on different systems, and they may well have different effects. In 1997, in the campaign for the nomination for the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Joe Biden, who of course is still very active, still a senator, and still very important in the U.S. Senate, was a strong contender to become the Democratic presidential nominee. Someone noticed that in one of his campaign speeches he seemed to be using the same words as had been used in speeches by a British Labor Party politician, Neil Kinnock, and was able to show that whole phrases and passages were the same. Then later it was seen that he had taken parts of speeches from Robert F. Kennedy. Well, people noticed this; they didn’t pay all that much attention to it because rhetoric and spoken verbal language… this is not that big of a deal. However, someone then, in investigating this, found out that when he was at law school at the University of Delaware, Joe Biden had received an F in a course because he had plagiarized in a term paper that he had written. This was a required course, so he had to take the whole course all over again in order to receive his degree. But what he had done there was exactly what Mr. Putin did, which was he had taken without quotes and without attribution some eight or ten pages from a legal brief. He listed in his bibliography the work that was copied, but he didn’t put it in quotes and didn’t specifically reference where it came from. That demonstrated case of plagiarism turned out to be enough to finally force Mr. Biden to withdraw from the candidacy. So, yes, there has been at least a case, and maybe more, in the U.S. where it had serious consequences, but again the U.S. may be very specific about this, because it may be more sensitive to these things. This of course was while he was still a candidate; he wasn’t in office. It never prevented him from winning his Senate races; he’s still a senator. His own constituents seem to think that this isn’t serious enough to keep him out of the Senate…

Washington Profile: In conclusion, what are the main issues concerning Putin’s dissertation?

Gaddy: There are really only two issues involved. One is plagiarism, yes or no? Yes, there’s no question about it. Did he write it, yes or no? We don’t know, but many people have questioned it, even to the extent of saying it’s just a no-brainer, of course he didn’t write it. None of these guys wrote their dissertation; and if you look at what he was doing at the time, how could he have possibly written a dissertation. I don’t say that; I’m not sure. At least, in principle, it might be possible that he actually wrote it. But again, it’s not well written; if he wrote it, it’s a cut-and-paste job…I’m not sure whether it would be better for him if he did write it or he didn’t write it. If he did write it, he’s guilty of plagiarism; if he didn’t write it, he’s guilty of getting a degree on false pretenses…

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