FACTBOX: Key facts on Dmitry Medvedev
(Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin's chosen successor Dmitry Medvedev is set to win a landslide victory in Sunday's presidential election, first official results show.
The following are the key sections of Medvedev's biography.
EARLY LIFE
Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev was born September 14, 1965. He grew up in a 40 square meter (430 square ft) flat in a suburb of Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then called.
He says his favorite childhood books were the Soviet Encyclopedia and Jules Verne's Children of Captain Grant.
"He was a leader, people listened to him. He is calm, disciplined and confident," said Irina Grigorovskaya, his mathematics teacher at school 305, where he met his wife. "He was well read from a young age and he read a lot."
Medvedev's parents were teachers. He says the family never starved and holidayed on the Black Sea, a typical Soviet middle-class destination. But money was sometimes too short to buy the records he dreamed of as a fan of British rock bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Deep Purple.
Medvedev was christened into the Russian Orthodox church aged 23 in St Petersburg.
STUDENT
Medvedev studied law at St Petersburg University, graduating in 1987. President Vladimir Putin had graduated from the same law faculty in 1975.
"He was one of the bright sparks from civil law," said Nikolai Kropachev, current dean of the law faculty who worked with Medvedev in the 1990s. "If you asked him to find two solutions to a problem, he would find three, or find a solution no one had ever found before."
CAREER
Medvedev went on to teach civil law at the law faculty, where he insisted students have a good grasp of Latin.
He also worked for the external relations committee of the St Petersburg mayor's office where he became friends with Putin, who also worked there after returning from a KGB posting.
While still teaching and working at the mayor's office, Medvedev moved into Russia's business world.
Medvedev worked as a key lawyer for the Ilim Pulp paper firm, even helping to found the firm, though colleagues say he was never treated as an equal by the firm's owners.
KREMLIN
When Putin was appointed prime minister in 1999, he invited Medvedev to Moscow and named him deputy head of the government administration. Boris Yeltsin made Putin acting president on the last day of 1999, and Putin appointed Medvedev a deputy to his chief-of-staff, Alexander Voloshin.
Medvedev ran Putin's election campaign in 2000 and was elected Gazprom chairman in June. He played a key role in Putin's plan to assert the Kremlin's control over the gas giant.
When Voloshin resigned in October 2003 over the arrest of Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Medvedev was appointed chief-of-staff, one of Russian politics' most powerful posts.
In 2005, Putin made Medvedev first deputy prime minister and gave him responsibility for carrying out four national projects to improve healthcare, education, housing and agriculture.
Putin announced that Medvedev was his favoured candidate for president on December 10 last year. The next day Medvedev said he wanted Putin to become his prime minister.
