The Big Question: Who is Dmitry Medvedev, and what would his presidency mean for Russia?
Why is this the question of the moment? Dmitry Medvedev, one of Russia’s two first deputy prime ministers, has been formally nominated by the dominant United Russia party as its candidate for the presidential election next March. He was crowned at the party’s congress, held this week in Moscow and, crucially, endorsed by President Vladimir Putin. In a piece of televisual stage-management clearly designed to send a message of top-level approval and continuity to Russian voters, the two men had entered the hall together and walked briskly towards the platform side by side through the applauding throng of delegates. Who is Dmitry Medvedev? He was born in 1965 in St Petersburg, then called Leningrad, to professional parents: his father was a professor and his mother a teacher. He graduated from Leningrad State University in law in 1987, just as Mikhail Gorbachev started the reforms that resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and embarked on a conventional academic career. From 1990,
