FACTBOX: Key facts on Russia's Dmitry Medvedev

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin's trusted protege Dmitry Medvedev is overwhelming favorite to win the March 2 presidential election.

The following are the key sections of Medvedev's biography.

EARLY LIFE

Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev was born Sept 14, 1965. His parents were teachers and 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 Encyclopaedia -- similar to the Encyclopaedia Britannica -- 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 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.

A fan of British hard rock bands Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Deep Purple, Medvedev said he became disillusioned with Soviet propaganda.

Medvedev was christened into the Russian Orthodox church aged 23 in St Petersburg.

STUDENT

Medvedev went to study law, graduating from the law department of St Petersburg University in 1987, which later became a source of the local and then Kremlin elite.

Putin graduated from the same faculty in 1975 and Anatoly Sobchak, Putin's political mentor and later mayor of St Petersburg, taught at the faculty.

"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."

Medvedev submitted a sparkling dissertation and went on to teach civil law at the 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 established a friendship with Putin, who was also working for the mayor after returning from a KGB posting to Dresden.

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