Europe
Tatiana Dyachenko
Like Father, Like Daughter
She is said to have departed politics “like a sphinx in a skirt.” But has Tatiana Dyachenko, 40, the daughter of Russia’s former President Boris Yeltsin, really left the Kremlin? President Vladimir Putin dismissed her shortly after his election. But Dyachenko stayed. She still has an office in the Kremlin and holds the job of part-time adviser. “For some reason,” speculates Anna Zebrowska in Warsaw’s Gazeta Wyborcza Magazine, “Putin doesn’t publicize this.”
Dyachenko has always been a riddle. During her father’s administration, she surrounded herself with a wall of silence, granted few interviews, and shunned publicity and photographers “like the Queen of England,” mocks Zebrowska.
Her role as the daughter of a former president had so far ensured her firm position in Russian politics, but those days are numbered, judging by Putin’s proven determination to topple the “old guard.”
“Most of the people around Tatiana I tried to interview,” writes Zebrowska, “have developed amnesia. ‘Are you afraid of her?’ I asked. ‘The walls have ears,’ one man replied, adding: ‘But when economic problems arise, Putin will begin throwing members of the family to the wolves. Then woe to poor Tatiana.’
