Russian State Library
Astakhov graduated from the law faculty of the Dzerzhinsky KGB School in Moscow in 1991. In 2002 he received a Master of Laws from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In 2006 Astakhov received a Doctor of Laws in Russia. Firstly the community Dissernet, then the Russian State Library tested his doctoral thesis for plagiarism and discovered that only 0.68% of the text was original work, the remainder having been copy-pasted from other sources.