Profile/Dmitry Medvedev:If Dmitry Medvedev becomes Russian president, he is expected to be a steady, if dull, bureaucrat - but they said the same when Putin came to power, writes Daniel McLaughlin
President Vladimir Putin professes to be a humble servant of Mother Russia, dutifully restoring kudos and cash to an emasculated superpower, but he carries with him a weighty ego.
This is a man who threatens to "rub out terrorists in the outhouse" and likes posing for photos on fighter planes, submarines and ski-slopes, dressed up in his judo gear and even bare-chested on a riverbank doing a spot of very macho fishing.
And he brooks no rival for the media spotlight or the affection of his people.
During almost eight years in power, Putin has sacked or sidelined anyone who even remotely threatened to overshadow him, and promoted men with negative charisma ratings and no discernible ideas of their own: witness the dismissal of flashy prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and his replacement by portly dullard Mikhail Fradkov and then Viktor Zubkov, an ageing automaton apparently programmed to utter only gruff, Soviet-style platitudes.
Witness also Putin's decision to ignore the presidential claims of Sergei Ivanov - a former defence minister who is usually stern but shows occasional flashes of rakish charm - in favour of Dmitry Medvedev, a dumpy technocrat shorter even than the diminutive Putin.
No one doubts that the lawyer Medvedev is bright, capable, decent and above all loyal to Putin, whom he has already asked to be his prime minister when he succeeds him in the Kremlin in March, after a presidential election that will surely be a mere formality.
But will the next president of the world's largest country, its biggest exporter of gas and second-biggest exporter of oil, really be nothing more than Putin's obedient puppet?
DMITRY ANATOLYEVICH MEDVEDEV was born in St Petersburg on September 14th, 1965, and his parents were both university professors. He is remembered as a polite, studious but unremarkable child at the city's School No 305, where he was a member of the Komsomol communist youth group and met his future wife, Svetlana.
In 1982 he entered the law faculty of Leningrad State University, and spent much of his spare time taping rock music by the likes of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and dreaming of owning a decent music system on which to play them.
One of his lecturers was Anatoly Sobchak, an eminent professor who became involved in politics in the late 1980s, as Mikhail Gorbachev began to liberalise the Soviet Union and communism started to crumble across eastern Europe.
In 1989, Medvedev completed his graduate studies while working for the campaign team that helped Sobchak win a seat in the Soviet parliament. Two years later, Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad just as it was re-named St Petersburg.
Legend has it that on a September morning in 1990, just a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Medvedev got a phone call at home from one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who asked if they could meet.
Putin, 13 years older than Medvedev, had also studied law under Sobchak. But while Medvedev had spent the last five years quietly studying as a gale of reform buffeted the Soviet bloc, Putin had been working as a KGB spy in East Germany.
Soon after Putin returned home, Sobchak appointed him to run St Petersburg's committee for external relations, and Medvedev became his legal adviser.
The three men worked closely together until Sobchak lost a 1996 mayoral election, prompting Medvedev to slip into a quiet life divided between academia and business, and Putin to move to the powerful property department of Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin.
Medvedev's life in the shadows would soon be over, however.
When Yeltsin made Putin prime minister in 1999, he summoned Medvedev to work with him in Moscow and, after the ex-KGB spy became president the following year, he quickly made his old colleague deputy head of the Kremlin administration.
Seen as a discreet and effective facilitator during Putin's first term in office, Medvedev's profile has increased dramatically as the second term has worn on and speculation has intensified over who would succeed the hugely popular president.
In Putin's perpetual struggle to maintain a balance of power between the factions in his entourage, Medvedev has been cast as a leading liberal largely because of his soft-spoken demeanour and background in law and business rather than the security services.
But he was with state-controlled gas giant Gazprom in 2001 when it seized Russia's best independent television station, NTV, and under his chairmanship since 2002 it has often clashed with foreign customers, even cutting supplies to Ukraine during a price row that sent shivers through the EU, which buys one-fifth of its gas from the company.
He has also supported Putin's policy of bringing strategic sectors of industry back under state control, an aim that was partly achieved by the imprisonment of Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the purchase of his Yukos oil firm's finest assets at rock-bottom prices by Kremlin-run company Rosneft.
Medvedev kept a low profile during these turbulent times, and what he said reinforced his reputation as Putin's man: that Russia is a real democracy with independent courts and media, and the state will not meddle unduly with the free market.
Medvedev has made a career out of being competent and inoffensive, and no one expects him to change course now.
And by backing him to become president, Putin has snubbed the leaders of various security service clans whose battle for influence and wealth threatens to destabilise Russia.
In the months before Medvedev's nomination, as uncertainty grew over whom Putin would choose as a successor, a power struggle between the domestic security service and the anti-narcotics agency burst into the light with an armed stand-off between rival agents.
The near-shoot-out and other incidents prompted the head of the anti-narcotics agency and several former KGB officers to break their customary silence and publish letters in leading newspapers asking Putin to intervene in the dangerous turf war.
Each clan has a representative among Putin's closest circle of advisers, most of whom share his security service past, and all wanted to dominate the post-Putin Kremlin.
Medvedev's lack of a KGB history may have helped him triumph over Sergei Ivanov, another old and trusted Putin ally who was seen as his main rival for the presidential nomination. Ivanov's candidacy would have given undue influence to his friends in the military and so ruined the balance of power that Putin has fought so hard to maintain.
If President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin do take power in March, the former will present a friendly face to the West while the latter guides crucial policy, keeps the security services on a tight leash and reserves the right to criticise or even take over from Medvedev should it be necessary to preserve national stability.
Stability is what Putin promised Russians when he took over from the ailing Yeltsin, whose tenure saw his country lurch from crisis to crisis, and who transferred de facto power from the security services to the billionaire businessmen now known as the oligarchs.
Under Putin, the oligarchs have been tamed, jailed or exiled, and his old KGB colleagues have flooded positions of power to reassert the state's control of industry and stifle political opposition and free media, while wages and pensions have increased thanks to an economic boom fuelled by record oil prices.
AFTER YELTSIN THE wild tsar, and Putin the disciplinarian redeemer, Medvedev looks like Mr Average - and that is just what Putin and many Russians want.
At a time when Russia is often attacked by the West for its democratic failings, alleged assassination of critics at home and abroad, and continuing human rights abuses in Chechnya, Medvedev could answer the call for Putinism with a human face. He is best known in Russia for overseeing the spending of oil revenues on four high-profile "national projects" to improve healthcare, education, housing and agriculture, areas that are of daily concern to ordinary Russians and desperately need huge investment.
Medvedev has made improving living standards his top priority, and state-run media assiduously depict him as a regular member of Russia's growing middle class, a decent guy who likes swimming, yoga, spending time with his wife and 11-year-old son Ilya and listening to music - particularly his beloved collection of original Deep Purple records.
The double act being formed at the summit of Russian power would embody Putin's vision of his country: Medvedev represents a young, modern, stable and liberal democracy, in tune with the West and comfortable dealing with it, but always backed by the steely power represented by Putin, a man who is proud of his KGB past.
However, "dvoevlastie", or dual-power, has never sat easily with Russia.
Vladimir Lenin used the term to describe the unstable relationship between the provisional government and workers' councils after the February Revolution of 1917, which lasted only until the Bolsheviks decisively seized power in October of the same year.
It is not clear whether Putin will use his massive support in parliament to change the constitution and shift the locus of power from the Kremlin to the prime minister's office, something he could portray as a modernisation and liberalisation of Russian democracy.
It also remains to be seen how the dual-power structure will withstand constant tugging and probing from the hawkish security service cliques that seek to sway Russia's leader, whoever that may really be.
Whatever happens, Putin will be present should events demand his steadying hand: he has spoken about a "moment of truth in global politics" over Kosovo's looming declaration of independence, something that could prompt similar claims from two Russian-backed regions of Georgia, which says it would view such a move as a declaration of war.
Perhaps the biggest question concerns Medvedev himself, how he will change the Kremlin and how the Kremlin will change him. After all Putin, Russia's hero, was also dismissed as a bland bureaucrat when he stepped blinking from Yeltsin's broad shadow.Who is he? Russian first deputy prime minister and chairman of energy behemoth Gazprom
The Medvedev File
Why is he in the news?Vladimir Putin wants him to win March's presidential election.
Most appealing characteristic:Loves listening to his collection of original Deep Purple LPs
Least appealing characteristic:Dances to Putin's tune
Most likely to say:What do you think, boss?
Least likely to say:Not now Vlad, I'm busy running Russia.