Insider Medvedev shows Kremlin's softer side

Dmitry Medvedev

A former law professor who completed his meteoric rise to the Kremlin in a presidential election Sunday, Dmitry Medvedev is seen as a Kremlin insider with a liberal tinge.
Plucked from obscurity by his old friend Vladimir Putin, Medvedev, 42, has a milder manner than his KGB-trained mentor, focusing on social projects rather than military might and hinting at a softer stance towards the West.
But having spent the past eight years at the heart of Moscow's Byzantine political machine and overseeing the Gazprom gas giant as it played hardball with Russia's neighbours, Medvedev is clearly a creature of the Putin regime.
The unimposing lawyer met Putin in the early 1990s when he acted as a legal consultant to Saint Petersburg City Hall where Putin worked -- an office that has served as a crucible for much of today's Kremlin leadership.
After spending most of the decade as a professor of law at Saint Petersburg University and a legal consultant in the forestry business, he was whisked to Moscow to run then prime minister Putin's first election campaign in 2000.
From penning textbooks on civil law, Medvedev suddenly found himself helping to run the Kremlin after Putin's victory, while also acting as chairman of state-controlled Gazprom, one of the world's largest energy companies.
Medvedev is credited with helping build the pyramid of power that has secured Putin's position, notably through his role in curbing the influence of billionaire oligarchs who held sway under Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
Under his stewardship, the Gazprom monopoly -- which controls a quarter of the world's known gas reserves -- has been accused of using the threat of gas supply cuts to some of Russia's ex-Soviet neighbours as a geopolitical weapon.
But Medvedev only really stepped into the limelight with his appointment as first deputy prime minister in 2005, a post he used to pump Russia's windfall oil profits into social projects in health, education, housing and agriculture.