For Dmitri Medvedev, 42, the challenge and privilege of being Russia's new President is tempered by the knowledge that he must escape Vladimir Putin's shadow. Many in Russia's political elite regard him as a stop-gap figure, installed because the Constitution barred Mr Putin from a third consecutive term.

Some talk openly of a Putin restoration in 2012, by when the constitution may have been changed to extend presidential terms from four to seven years.

But who is Dmitri Medvedev and what does he believe? Like Mr Putin, he grew up in St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad and Soviet Russia's most liberal city Both men also graduated in law from Leningrad State University.

There the comparison ends. Mr Putin, famously, began a career in the KGB, while Mr Medvedev has no known links with the secret police or the military.

The man whose surname comes, fittingly, from the Russian word for “bear” is a soft-spoken former law professor who practises yoga and speaks to his mother on the telephone every day.

Mr Putin's image as a cold-eyed former spy and judo black belt compensates for his relative lack of stature at 5ft 7ins. Mr Medvedev is three inches shorter and has been given lessons in how to walk and talk like his mentor to cut a more imposing figure.

His image as first Deputy Prime Minister under Mr Putin has been that of a capable but essentially colourless administrator, charged with overseeing key “national projects” to improve health, education, agriculture and housing.

He has tried to present a trendier image to Russian voters by disclosing his love of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and other Seventies British hard rock bands, a devotion fired by listening to bootleg albums at a time when their music was blacklisted as subversive by the Soviet authorities.

“I remember how I dreamed of buying Pink Floyd's The Wall album which had just appeared, but for me at the time 200 roubles was an astronomical sum,” he said. Mr Medvedev also lamented that his parents, both university professors, earned too little to buy him Levi's and Wrangler jeans, then available only on the black market.

When Deep Purple played for him at the Kremlin last month, Mr Medvedev was pictured grinning broadly next to his heroes and marvelling on television that it would have been “completely surreal” to imagine such a concert in his youth.

Such images might seem corny in Britain but they resonate with a generation of voters that has made the same journey as Mr Medvedev, from the Communist stagnation of their youth through the post-Soviet humiliations of the 1990s as young adults and into maturity in modern Russia's economic boom.

These people regard Mr Putin as the man who restored Russia's pride and saved the country from economic collapse. His sober, action-man image made him for many Russians the first Kremlin leader in their lifetimes that they were not ashamed of.

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