The awful truth about Vladimir Putin’s mother and how her brush with the most gruesome of deaths made him so barbaric

In the freezing, snow-laden streets of Leningrad, families carried dead relatives – almost mummified by brutal temperatures of minus 43C – down the stairs of darkened tenement blocks. 

Some noticed just how light these corpses, ravaged by hunger, were as they loaded them on sleds and dragged them along the road like bin bags to mass collection points.

Starving gravediggers did not have the strength to break the frozen winter ground and so mechanical diggers created vast gaping pits, accommodation for thousands of anonymous cadavers. 

There had been so many fatalities throughout the city in the space of weeks that the dead had to queue up to be buried, their bodies stacked like logs.

One such body was that of a handsome, dignified woman in her 30s. It was assumed that she had, like so many others, died of starvation. 

Her name was Maria Ivanovna Shelomova Putina – the mother of Vladimir Putin.

Yet – according to one account – on that silent street of tall 19th century…