Smoke on the Water.(The Talk of the Town)(Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev)

Alexander II, before liberating the serfs, liberated the smokers. (To indulge his own habit, he lifted the imperial ban on tobacco.) Alexander III played the French horn. Nicholas II was a photography buff. Catherine the Great was a passionate equestrienne. Maybe it has something to do with the vastness of Russia's geography or with the bloody absolutism of its history, but it's always been easier to contemplate a new master of the Kremlin by seizing on homey anecdotes.

Trivia domesticated even the worst Soviet-era resumes. When Leonid Brezhnev died, in 1982, and the K.G.B. chief, Yuri Andropov, became General Secretary of the Communist Party, the Western press did not skip lightly over the new man's role in crushing the Hungarian uprising, in 1956, and the Prague Spring, in 1968, but it also greeted him with bonbons of wishful description. The Times reported that Andropov's "intense gaze and donnish demeanor gave him the air of a scholar." According to Time, he was a "witty conversationalist," who listened to the song stylings of Miss Peggy Lee. And an article in the Washington Post Outlook section called him "a perfect host," who occasionally invited "leading dissidents to his home for well-lubricated discussions that sometimes extended to the wee hours of the morning."

Now comes Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, the next President of Russia. Five feet four. Forty-two years old. Lawyer. Friend and longtime protege of Vladimir Putin. Husband (wife: Svetlana). Father (son: Ilya, age eleven). Nickname in the Kremlin: the Grand Vizier. Favorite book as a boy: "The Soviet Encyclopedia." Understands "Olbanian," the term of art for Russian Internet slang. Practices yoga. Swims each morning and evening. Big fan of seventies schlock bands. "I've loved hard rock since my school days," he told an interviewer not long ago. "Today, for example, I can boast that I have the entire collection of Deep Purple." And, if you're still curious, Medvedev keeps an aquarium in his office at the Kremlin. He alone is permitted to feed the fish.

When Vladimir Putin came to power, on New Year's Eve, 1999, we learned that he was a judo expert, that he had a poodle named Toska, and that his grandfather had been a cook for Lenin. But the most salient fact about him was that he was a career K.G.B. agent. And, in eight years as President of the Russian Federation, Putin has been as true to his school as any Old Etonian. According to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a well-regarded sociologist in Moscow, who studies the biographies of the Russian elites, Putin has filled the leadership ranks with former officials from the K.G.B. and the F.S.B. As he once told an assembly of officers at Lubyanka, "There is no such thing as a former agent."

The most salient fact about Medvedev is not that he will have been elected by the Russian people to be their President but that he was selected by Putin to be his junior partner. Medvedev, of course, understands his role. In the speech in which he announced his candidacy, he thrilled the spies, bureaucrats, and corporate barons who depend on Putin for their status and their wealth by declaring that, if, perchance, he was lucky enough to win, he would make Putin his prime minister. It was at that moment that Dmitry Medvedev became five feet three.

During the depressing simulacrum of an election campaign, Medvedev has been promoted assiduously on state television as a loyal and competent young man who will respond reliably to his master's voice and thereby insure that the Russian economy, buoyed by global oil prices that have quintupled in six years, will continue to flourish. ...