Amid all of the Economic Forum analysis and the pre-presidential race commentaries, it is refreshing to see Simon Shuster of Time magazine offer something of a guilty pleasure.  It is a well-known fact that the media in Russia are about as free as an arm in a tourniquet, but none so much as when it comes to the personal life of their very own Prime Minister.  Whilst other heads of state readily tout their wives, children and assorted pets as public appeal-builders, totems to family values, and annexes of their own political machine, Putin has always been rather cagey about his.  His public image tends to be that of a lone wolf, spearing fish topless in a Siberian river, staring into the distance solipsistically on horseback, or “chilling” with bearded biker buddies.  What about Mrs Putin?  And the Putin daughters?  Shuster gratifies the inner Hello reader in us, but with typical incisiveness: 

Although the Russian state has tried, it has not yet learned to censor the country’s army of iconoclastic bloggers, and in the information vacuum surrounding Putin’s private life, their claims go viral fast. Last year, a blogger named Pavel Pritula claimed in a two-sentence post that Putin had sent his wife to live in a monastery in the region of Pskov, perhaps owing something to the stories of what Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great had once done with inconvenient women in their lives. The Russian Orthodox Church denied the claim as “nonsense,” and Putin’s office declined to comment. But once this rumor began to snowball, it didn’t even seem to matter to many readers that the blogger’s only source had been his own mother. Through hyperlinks, word of mouth and stories in the online press, the rumor became part of Putin folklore.