How Mrs Medvedev turned an academic into a president

Svetlana Medvedev … church and charity worker.Photo: Reuters

Nick Holdsworth and Will Stewart in MoscowMarch 3, 2008

TWO-THIRDS of Russians voting in yesterday's presidential election were expected to back Dmitry Medvedev as Vladimir Putin's successor in the country's most predictable poll since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mr Medvedev, the low-key First Deputy Prime Minister and chairman of the state-run Gazprom gas monopoly, was in effect handpicked by Mr Putin, who will become prime minister.

The election will guarantee that the popular Mr Putin continues to wield great influence over the Russian government, but the other driving force in Mr Medvedev's unexpected rise to Russia's highest office is his wife, Svetlana.

The couple were childhood friends and high-school sweethearts in St Petersburg. The steely 42-year-old Mrs Medvedev is widely believed to have provided much of the drive that has helped propel her husband - once a mild-mannered law lecturer - to the very top of Russia's political tree.

Sociable and energetic, she is credited with forging the contacts that enabled her husband to break out of academia into the world of commerce, a move that propelled him into Mr Putin's path. She helped draw him into the Russian Orthodox Church, which has endorsed him in yesterday's election.

Now she is expected to be an influential presence behind the scenes at the Kremlin, as well as providing what he calls "a solid and dependable rearguard".

Mrs Medvedev's parents provided a home for the couple when they were married in 1989, allowing them to share their cramped flat. Eventually Mrs Medvedev prodded her husband to form the contacts needed to move into the more lucrative world of commerce, becoming a director of a timber firm, Pulp Ilim, in the mid-1990s.

A source close to them said: "He was happy, really, writing books on law and working at the state university in St Petersburg, but she had the contacts from her social life and she pushed him into the timber company. Everything he has done, she has helped and supported him in."

Stung by opponents' taunts that her husband looked "like a scholar fresh from the library", Mrs Medvedev is also credited with his recent weight loss and increasingly muscular appearance, achieved by making him learn yoga, go to the gym and swim more than a kilometre twice a day.

With her own degree in finance and economics she could have had her own career. But with Mr Medvedev earning good money from Pulp Ilim, his wife immersed herself herself in social work - for which the Orthodox Church gave her a medal - and high fashion.

She heads the board of a church-backed educational program that aims to bring more spiritual and moral discipline to Russia's post-Soviet young generation. The controversial project is part of the Orthodox Church's drive to reintroduce religion into Russia's schools, 90 years after the Bolshevik revolution banished priests from the classroom.

Despite opponents' claims that he has salted away vast fortunes, Mr Medvedev recently declared an annual income of just over $75,000, a Moscow flat, land outside the city and a nine-year-old Volkswagen Golf owned by his wife.

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