WASHINGTON -- After his KGB spy days and before becoming President of Russia, Vladimir Putin busied himself by writing a PhD thesis at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. The seminal, 218-page work - "Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations" - still guides his economic thinking today. In it, Mr. Putin floated the idea of nurturing "national champion" companies and harnessing Russia's natural resources to create an economic superpower. No matter that experts say large tracts of Mr. Putin's dissertation were blatantly plagiarized from a KGB translation of a 30-year-old textbook by two University of Pittsburgh...