And, in eight years as President of the Russian Federation, Putin has been as true to his school as any Old Etonian. But the most salient fact about him was that he was a career K.G.B. 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. “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. “I’ve loved hard rock since my school days,” he told an interviewer not long ago. Favorite book as a boy: “The Soviet Encyclopedia.” Understands “Olbanian,” the term of art for Russian Internet slang. Nickname in the Kremlin: the Grand Vizier. Friend and longtime protégé of Vladimir Putin. Now comes Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, the next President of Russia. 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.” 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. 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. When Leonid Brezhnev died, in 1982, and the K.G.B. Trivia domesticated even the worst Soviet-era résumés.
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