Bloggers accuse her of copying passages from Kremlin spin doctor's book for column in tabloid newspaper

Since her expulsion from the US last year for spying, Anna Chapman has reinvented herself as an entrepreneur, TV personality, and cheerleader for the Kremlin.

But the 29-year-old has also become a growing target for ridicule over her role in a series of state-promoted PR stunts.

Now she faces claims that she plagiarised a controversial Kremlin spin doctor in the column she writes for a tabloid newspaper.

Prominent bloggers say Chapman copied almost word for word a passage from a book by Oleg Matveyechev in her article for the mass market Komsomolskaya Pravda on Alexander Pushkin, Russia's most revered poet.

Chapman argued that the bloody Bolshevik revolution of 1917 would never have happened had Pushkin not been killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37.

"Just half a century later, liberals and socialists flooded Russia and killed the tsar, and then set the course for the revolution," she wrote. "I'm confident that things would have been different if Pushkin had managed to write his mature works."

But bloggers said her text was almost a direct copy of a passage from a book by Matveyechev, a member of prime minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia

Matveyechev's 2009 book, The Sovereignty of the Soul, goes further, describing Pushkin's death as an anti-Russian plot organised by Europe. Chapman merely argues that, had he lived, Pushkin could have become "a poet whose global historical significance would have surpassed that of Homer and Shakespeare".

Since returning to Russia after being expelled by the US for being part of a spy ring, Chapman has remained in the spotlight as a member of United Russia's Young Guard youth group and via attempts to promote investment in Russian venture capital funds. A raunchy photo spread in the Russian edition of Maxim men's magazine also kept her in the public eye.

Last week she was heckled during a speech on leadership at St Petersburg University. Students held up signs saying "Chapman, get out of the university!" and "The Kremlin and the porn studio are in the other direction!"

Matveyechev gained notoriety last year after writing on his blog that he dreamed of gathering the Russian opposition on a city square and calling in an army of tanks to mow them down. "And then, like after Tiananmen in China, we would also have 10% annual economic growth after 20 or 30 years," he wrote.

Matveyechev sits on the board of Right to Smile, a charity for children with sight problems that Chapman founded in her hometown of Volgograd, where Matveyechev is also vice governor.

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