Spiridon Putin

Spiridon Ivanovich Putin (Спиридон Иванович Путин; 19 December 1879 – 19 December 1965) was a Russian chef, who worked as the personal chef of Vladimir Lenin and also cooked for Joseph Stalin. He was the paternal grandfather of Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.

Early life and education
Spiridon Putin was born to Ivan Petrovich Putin (1845–1918) and Paraskeva Matveevna Putina (née Golubeva; 1844–1906), a Russian family in Tver Governorate, Russian Empire. At 12 years old he worked with his cousin at an inn in Tver, and at 15 years old he moved to Saint Petersburg to study cooking.

Career
Putin worked at the famous Hotel Astoria in Saint Petersburg, where he once served Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin gave Putin a gold ruble as he was impressed with the cuisine and noticed the similarity between their names.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Putin fled to his ancestral home in Tver Governorate. He later returned to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), after which he moved to Moscow. In Moscow he became Vladimir Lenin's chef. After Lenin's death in 1924, Putin cooked for his widow Nadezhda Krupskaya and her sister until their deaths years later. During this time he also cooked occasionally for Joseph Stalin. Putin most likely served in the employ of the NKVD, the secret police predecessor of the KGB. After Krupskaya's death in 1939, he worked as chef in a Moscow Communist Party boarding house at Ilyinsky, Moscow Oblast.

Putin continued working as a chef until shortly before his death in Moscow on his 86th birthday in 1965.

Personal life
Of his four sons, two died in World War II, another, Vladimir, father of the future president, was crippled in combat, and one son, Alexander, came back from war unscathed.