Russia’s Mighty Mouse

In a high-ceilinged room at the St. Petersburg mayor's office in 1992, overlooking St. Isaac's Square and its fine equestrian statue of Tsar Nicholas I, two small men shared one big desk. The older man was a tough ex-KGB lieutenant colonel named Vladimir Putin. He ran the mayor's commercial dealings and was always "very business-like and serious," says Dmitry Lenkov, a member of the city council who was a frequent visitor. Putin's deputy, a quiet young lawyer, was named Dmitry Medvedev. He was a "hardly noticeable gray mouse— nobody really paid attention much to him," says Lenkov. "Putin made all the decisions, Medvedev did the legwork."

Sixteen years later, Putin has decided that his former subordinate will succeed him as president of Russia. There will be an election, of course, on March 2. But in the "sovereign democracy" Putin has created—largely by stifling independent media and cracking down on dissidents—Medvedev faces no real opposition. Most observers expect the mouse to do his master's bidding: he's already promised to appoint Putin as prime minister, and to keep in place "the efficient team that the incumbent president has assembled." (Even though they've been friends for nearly two decades, Medvedev still addresses his boss by the formal "vy"—the equivalent of calling him "Mr. Putin" in English.) One former top Kremlin official, who has worked with both men but did not want to offend either, says the power dynamic between them has not changed since St. Petersburg: "Putin will stay on as long as he needs to in order to make sure that his boy isn't eaten alive."

Does that mean Russia is headed for an unofficial third term for Putin? Russians don't seem to mind—Putin's approval ratings top 76 percent—and Medvedev is unlikely to make any dramatic changes at first. But while much in their shared history has pushed the two men together, a closer look at the origins of their friendship also reveals much that could one day drive them apart.

Some of their differences are superficial. Putin, 55, is the quintessential Russian tough guy: he loves the martial arts and swears like a trooper; last week he referred to press allegations of his private fortune as "muck picked out of someone's nose and smeared on paper." He watches war movies and listens to patriotic Russian rock. Medvedev, 42, is a slightly built, soft-spoken corporate lawyer. He's written a slew of respected legal textbooks; his favorite sport is swimming. The toughest thing about him seems to be that he's a fan of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

Other distinctions are more telling. Putin grew up in a tough working-class suburb of St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, in a prefabricated apartment block without hot water. In his 2000 autobiography, "First Person," he recalls leading gangs of kids to chase and kill rats in the stairwells. Yet at the same time, the Soviet Union, under Leonid Brezhnev, was at the peak of its influence. Putin was brought up as one of the last believers in communism; he dreamed of joining the KGB after watching Soviet spy films. As president, he's called the collapse of the Soviet Union the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." Medvedev, on the other hand, was born into a world of Leningrad intellectuals. His mother, Yulia, taught Russian language and literature, and his father, Anatoly, was a physicist. "I wanted to persuade him that he should become a [scientist] like his father," says Irina Grigorovskaya, who taught Medvedev math at School No. 305. "But already by the age of 14 he firmly said no; he insisted that he would go into the law."

Leningrad in the late 1980s was the Soviet Union's most liberal city. Communism was beginning to unravel, and amid the excitement of glasnost, students would pack auditoriums to listen to lectures on Stalinism by revisionist historians. They'd queue for the latest releases of poetry records by once banned authors. After graduating with a law degree from Leningrad State University, Medvedev went to work for one of his professors, Anatoly Sobchak, who was running for Parliament. It was a risky move: Sobchak's ideas about free markets and political pluralism were still fairly heretical. But when a set of campaign leaflets was deemed too politically racy by the KGB and confiscated, Medvedev was one of a group of supporters who stayed up to print another set by hand, on an old rotary copy machine. "Dima [Medvedev] told me afterwards that he felt like Lenin after printing [the communist underground newspaper] Iskra all night," says Sobchak's widow, Larisa Narusova. Sobchak was elected in a landslide.