Bookish former lawyer is Russia's new leader

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A diminutive, softly-spoken former corporate lawyer, Russia's new president Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is an unlikely figure to lead the biggest country on earth.

The first Russian leader in generations to have worked in the private sector, Medvedev, 42, was to be sworn in as president on Wednesday in a lavish televised ceremony in the Kremlin.

He secured the post after the popular outgoing leader Vladimir Putin endorsed him as his preferred successor, ensuring an overwhelming victory at the polls in March.

Medvedev has repeatedly cast himself as a continuity candidate who will follow the course set by Putin -- a popular line in Russia, where most of the population has benefited from rapid economic growth and rising incomes under Putin.

Further underlining continuity, Putin will stay on as Medvedev's prime minister and as leader of the United Russia party, which holds a big majority in the lower house of parliament.

But the two men differ radically in background, upbringing and style.

Putin was proud of his past as a KGB agent in former East Germany and loved posing for pictures flying fighter jets or standing aboard nuclear submarines. Medvedev has no known link to the secret services and has never served in the army.

A bookish child born to two university professors, Medvedev grew up in a modest, middle-class household. His speeches reflect his educated, lawyerly background and are laced with long, complex sub-clauses.

"He is very cultured. You can speak to him about the theatre, music, he has a sense of humor," said Natalya Rasskazova, who studied with Medvedev at St Petersburg University's law faculty.

Putin, by contrast, has entertained and shocked his countrymen with his frequent use of colorful slang. As a boy, he fought with rats in the stairwell of his communal apartment and learned judo to win respect in a mean neighborhood.

Medvedev has said little about his plans for government during the election campaign, shunning debates with other candidates and news conferences with foreign media and granting only one in-depth interview to a weekly news magazine.

His main campaign speech, in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, pledged respect for private property, freedom and an independent judiciary. Analysts described the comments as fine aspirations but questioned how easy it would be to put them into practice.

"I think he is a well-prepared, educated and modern. He has good experience as a lawyer, he's bright, but there is one drawback, he didn't work at the federal level long enough," the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, said of the new president earlier this year.

Friends say Medvedev's bookish, quiet exterior masks a man who has a steely determination to succeed and will not be pushed around.

"Dima is clever, clever enough to be president and he is tough, tough enough to be president," one former colleague from the 1990s told Reuters on condition his name was not published.

Medvedev graduated in 1987 from university and first worked with Putin when the latter was deputy head of the mayor's office in St Petersburg during the 1990s.

At the same time Medvedev also moved into business, a period of his life which is left out of official biographies. In 1989 he married Svetlana, a childhood sweetheart who trained as an economist, and the couple have one son.

Medvedev worked as a key lawyer for the Ilim Pulp paper firm, helping to found a firm which has since emerged as one of Russia's leading companies in a sector worth billions of dollars.

"He got a salary and he was in real business in the 1990s. He saw the reality," said his former colleague.

The ex-colleague said Medvedev took a stance unusual for the time: he avoided paying bribes, even losing the company a court case because he refused to give money to a judge.

Some Western ambassadors in Moscow believe Medvedev's selection may represent a desire by Putin to shift Russia onto a more investor-friendly path after the years of strident confrontation which marked his own years in the Kremlin.

"Putin saw his role as preventing Russia from falling apart, stabilizing the country, rebuilding respect abroad and getting the economy going," one envoy said. "That phase is now over."

"Medvedev represents a move towards civilizing the Kremlin. Not liberalizing it -- it is too early for that -- but giving the same policies a more civilized veneer."

(Additional reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Denis Pinchuk)