Is There A First Lady In Russia?

The first lady position in Russia is currently vacant, since the divorce of the current president Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina.

First Lady of the Russian Federation is the unofficial title given to the wife of the president of Russia. The post is highly ceremonial.

Lyudmila Putina, is the former wife of Vladimir Putin, who is the current president of Russia.

After Vladimir’s rise to political power, Lyudmila maintained a low profile on the Russian political stage, generally avoiding the limelight except as required by protocol and restricting her public role to supportive statements about her husband.

As First Lady, Lyudmila Putina was a curator of a fund that aimed to develop the Russian language and sometimes produced statements concerning Russian language and education.

Her preference for “maintaining and preserving” the Russian language led her to make public statements against orthographic reform.

Their recommendations were made public in 2002 after eight years of work, but were subsequently rejected by Putina, who used Russia’s burgeoning economy as one of her reasons why the orthographic reform was not just unnecessary but untimely.

However, although one newspaper in Moscow alleged that “Lyudmila Putin de facto cancelled any attempts to reform spelling,” the fact remains that public and academic reaction to the reforms was sufficiently negative to have that particular reform attempt abandoned.