Earlier this week, we covered a strange report from a St. Petersburg website speculating that a local entrepreneur best known for fast driving and a decade of astonishing business success (fuelled by municipal construction deals) was the illegitimate younger half brother of President Dmitry Medvedev.
The website reported that it had contacted the construction and investment firm headed by Mikhail Anatolevich Medvedev to inquire whether he is related to the president and was met with hostility and threats by the firm's deputy PR manager (the site posted a transcript and the audio of the conversation).
In a follow-up report on May 14, vkrizis.ru reported that Mikhail Medvedev is not related to the president.
The website said it had received Medvedev's records from the St. Petersburg State Polytechnic Institute which identified his father as Anatoly Ignatevich Medvedev, born in 1940, who served at a submarine-crew training facility in Tallinn, Estonia.
Mikhail Medvedev reportedly lived in Tallinn until 1990, when he moved to Leningrad (now, St. Petersburg).
It remains a mystery why the deputy PR manager responded to the website's inquiry with such wrath. Perhaps Mikhail Medvedev has been making hay over the last decade from the suspicion that he might be related to the president.
Rather than fearing that he'd be outed as the first brother, perhaps he was more worried that he'd be revealed as just another Medvedev with a 600,000-euro car and a knack for working the system.
As for President Medvedev, he remains, as previously thought, an only child and we continue psychoanalyzing him in the framework of only-child syndrome.
Other famous only children include Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Laura Bush, and Vladimir Putin.
-- Robert Coalson
The website reported that it had contacted the construction and investment firm headed by Mikhail Anatolevich Medvedev to inquire whether he is related to the president and was met with hostility and threats by the firm's deputy PR manager (the site posted a transcript and the audio of the conversation).
In a follow-up report on May 14, vkrizis.ru reported that Mikhail Medvedev is not related to the president.
The website said it had received Medvedev's records from the St. Petersburg State Polytechnic Institute which identified his father as Anatoly Ignatevich Medvedev, born in 1940, who served at a submarine-crew training facility in Tallinn, Estonia.
Mikhail Medvedev reportedly lived in Tallinn until 1990, when he moved to Leningrad (now, St. Petersburg).
It remains a mystery why the deputy PR manager responded to the website's inquiry with such wrath. Perhaps Mikhail Medvedev has been making hay over the last decade from the suspicion that he might be related to the president.
Rather than fearing that he'd be outed as the first brother, perhaps he was more worried that he'd be revealed as just another Medvedev with a 600,000-euro car and a knack for working the system.
As for President Medvedev, he remains, as previously thought, an only child and we continue psychoanalyzing him in the framework of only-child syndrome.
Other famous only children include Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Laura Bush, and Vladimir Putin.
-- Robert Coalson