Dmitry Medvedev

• 1. Introduction

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  Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev was born on the 14th of September 1965 in Leningrad, in what was then the Soviet Union. He grew up in a 40-square-metre apartment on Bela Kun Street in the Kupchino district, the only child of a chemical engineer and a language teacher. His first-grade teacher, Vera Smirnova, described him as a "dreadful why-asker." That instinct for questions would shape everything that followed.

  For a moment in the late 2000s, Medvedev seemed to represent something new in Russian politics. International analysts spoke of a possible liberal turn. He spoke openly about freedom, legal reform, and the dangers of corruption. He signed a nuclear arms treaty with the United States and modernised Russia's police force. Then, after leaving the presidency in 2012, he spent years in gradually diminishing roles. And after Russia invaded Ukraine, a man once described as mild-mannered began posting nuclear threats and calling Ukrainians "crazy Nazi drug addicts" on Telegram.

  How does a politician who quoted Freedom is better than non-freedom as his governing principle end up threatening to fire hypersonic missiles at a courthouse in The Hague? That is the question this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. A Leningrad Childhood

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  Medvedev's father, Anatoly Afanasyevich Medvedev, taught chemical engineering at the Leningrad State Institute of Technology. His mother, Yulia Veniaminovna Medvedeva, had studied languages at Voronezh University and later taught Russian at Herzen State Pedagogical University; she would also work as a tour guide at Pavlovsk Palace. The family was considered part of the Soviet intelligentsia, rooted in academic life and modest circumstances.

  In the third grade, young Dmitry worked through all ten volumes of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia that belonged to his father. By the second and third grades, he had memorised Earth's primary geologic periods from the Archean to the Cenozoic. Chemistry experiments followed in the fourth and fifth grades. By seventh grade, his attention shifted to a classmate named Svetlana Linnik, who would become his future wife. He later described the school's final exams in 1982 as "a tough period when I had to mobilize my abilities to the utmost for the first time in my life."

  His maternal grandparents were Ukrainians whose surname was Kovalev, originally Koval, and Medvedev traces his family roots to the Belgorod region. That heritage would become one of the more striking biographical footnotes decades later, when he began publicly denying the legitimacy of Ukrainian national identity.

• 3. Law, Rock, and Sobchak

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  In the autumn of 1982, seventeen-year-old Medvedev enrolled at Leningrad State University to study law. He had also considered linguistics, but later said he never regretted the choice, describing law as genuinely his thing. Fellow students remembered him as correct and diplomatic, firm in debate without giving offence. Outside the lecture halls, he was a fan of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple, and competed in rowing and weight-lifting.

  He graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1987 alongside several classmates who would later become his associates, among them Ilya Yeliseyev, Anton Ivanov, and Konstantin Chuychenko. He then pursued graduate studies in civil law rather than joining the prosecutor's office as he had initially considered. In 1990, he defended his dissertation on the civil juridical personality of state enterprises and received his Candidate of Juridical Sciences degree.

  One of his professors was Anatoly Sobchak, a major democratic politician of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1988, Medvedev joined Sobchak's team and served as the de facto head of Sobchak's successful campaign for a seat in the new Soviet parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR. After that campaign, Medvedev returned to academic life as an associate professor, teaching civil and Roman law until 1999. He co-wrote a three-volume civil law textbook during this period that would eventually sell a million copies. Another of Sobchak's students, Vladimir Putin, was already nearby. When Sobchak became mayor of Leningrad and then Saint Petersburg, Putin headed the Committee for Foreign Affairs at City Hall. Medvedev became a consultant to that same committee.

• 4. The Gazprom Years

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  In November 1993, while still connected to academic life, Medvedev became the legal affairs director of Ilim Pulp Enterprise, a Saint Petersburg timber company. He helped develop its expansion strategy and received twenty percent of the company's stock. Over the following seven years, Ilim Pulp became Russia's largest lumber company, with an annual revenue of around $500 million. Medvedev sold his shares in 1999; the profits he realised were not publicly disclosed.

  In June 1996, his colleague Vladimir Putin was brought into the Russian presidential administration. By August 1999, Putin had become Prime Minister. Three months later, Medvedev was among those brought from Saint Petersburg to top government positions in Moscow. On the 17th of January 2000, Putin, acting as president, signed a decree promoting Medvedev to the highest federal civilian service rank.

  Putin appointed Medvedev chairman of Gazprom's board of directors in 2000. Medvedev put an end to the large-scale tax evasion and asset stripping that had characterised the previous management. He served as chair, then deputy chair, then chair again, holding that position until his ascension to the presidency in 2008. During his tenure, Gazprom's market capitalisation grew from $7.8 billion in 2000 to $300 billion in early 2008. He also headed Russia's negotiations with Ukraine and Belarus during gas price disputes. In October 2003, he replaced Alexander Voloshin as presidential chief of staff, and in November 2005, Putin named him first deputy prime minister with responsibility for the National Priority Projects, covering public health, education, housing, and agriculture.

• 5. The Liberal President

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  On the 2nd of March 2008, Medvedev was elected President of Russia with 70.28% of the vote, representing more than 52 million ballots, on a turnout of 69.78% of registered voters. A poll by the independent Levada Center had found in late December 2007 that 79% of Russians said they would vote for him if an election were held immediately. The fairness of the vote was disputed; Andreas Gross, head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe mission, stated it was "neither free nor fair." A Russian analyst named Shpilkin calculated that after correcting for alleged falsification, Medvedev's actual share would have been around 63% rather than 70%.

  On the 7th of May 2008, Medvedev took his oath as the third president of the Russian Federation in the Grand Kremlin Palace. In his inaugural address he declared: "I believe my most important aims will be to protect civil and economic freedoms... We must fight for a true respect of the law and overcome legal nihilism."

  He signed an anti-corruption decree within two weeks of taking office, on the 19th of May 2008, and on the 30th of September he told the new Anti-Corruption Council: "Corruption in our country has become rampant. It has become commonplace and characterises the life of the Russian society." The resulting legislation, Federal Law N 273-FZ, was signed on the 25th of December 2008. Russia's score in the Corruption Perceptions Index rose from 2.1 in 2008 to 2.2 in 2009, which Transparency International described as a mildly positive response. By January 2011, Medvedev himself admitted the government had so far failed in its anti-corruption measures.

  His police reform was more concrete. Triggered by a shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket in April 2009, the reform raised officers' salaries by 30%, centralised financing and jurisdiction, and allocated around 217 billion rubles from the federal budget for 2012 to 2013. The New START treaty with the United States, signed during his presidency, stood as one of the most tangible international achievements of his tenure. He also launched the Presidential Commission on Innovation in May 2009 and visited Twitter's headquarters in Silicon Valley in June 2010, declaring a mission to bring high-tech investment to Russia.

• 6. War and the "Tandemocracy"

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  On the 7th of August 2008, Georgian army units entered the South Ossetian conflict zone after Russian-backed South Ossetian forces had been shelling Georgian villages. Georgian troops took control of most of Tskhinvali, a separatist stronghold, within hours. At that moment, Medvedev was on vacation and Putin was at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At about 1:00 a.m. on the 8th of August, Medvedev held a telephone conversation with Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov. It is believed that during this call Medvedev authorised the use of force against Georgia.

  After five days of fighting, Russian forces routed all Georgian units from South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Medvedev ended the operation on the 12th of August and later signed a decree recognising both territories as independent states. The five-day conflict cost the lives of 48 Russian soldiers and 170 Georgian soldiers, along with 14 Georgian police officers. An EU-sponsored investigation, published on the 30th of September 2009, concluded that open hostilities began with a large-scale Georgian military operation in the night of the 7th to the 8th of August, while noting that it had been preceded by months of mutual provocations.

  The question of who truly governed during these years never fully resolved. Journalists coined the term "tandemocracy" for the dual-headed executive, with Medvedev as president and Putin as prime minister. A Levada Center poll of 1,600 Russians in September 2009 found that 32% believed Putin held the most power, 13% believed Medvedev did, and 48% believed the two shared influence equally. One detail that circulated among observers: Medvedev addressed Putin using the formal Russian "Vy," while Putin addressed Medvedev with the informal "ty." Medvedev responded to the speculation by stating: "I am the leader of this state, I am the head of this state, and the division of power is based on this."

  On the 24th of September 2011, at the United Russia party congress, Medvedev publicly recommended Putin as the party's presidential candidate and revealed that the two men had agreed long before that Putin would return to the presidency in 2012. The media termed this arrangement "rokirovka," the Russian word for the chess move castling.

• 7. The Hawkish Turn

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  After serving as prime minister from 2012 to 2020, Medvedev's resignation came on the 15th of January 2020, when Putin delivered a presidential address proposing constitutional amendments. Medvedev said he was stepping aside to allow the changes. However, the Kommersant newspaper reported that the executive order cited articles of the constitution that give the president power to dismiss the government without explanation, suggesting the resignation was not voluntary.

  Putin appointed Medvedev deputy chairman of the Security Council the following day. His monthly salary in the new post was set at 618,713 rubles. A poll by the state-owned VTsIOM agency in June 2022 found that more than 68.3% of Russians surveyed said they did not trust Medvedev. A source close to the Kremlin told the outlet Meduza that his influence had greatly diminished compared to his time as prime minister.

  Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Medvedev shifted to a posture that startled observers who remembered his earlier rhetoric about freedom and the rule of law. He began issuing what analysts described as increasingly provocative statements. In September 2022, he said Russia could use any weapons in its arsenal, including strategic nuclear weapons, to protect annexed Ukrainian territories, adding this was "certainly not a bluff." On the 20th of March 2023, in response to the International Criminal Court issuing a warrant for Putin, Medvedev wrote on Telegram that it was "quite possible to imagine a hypersonic missile being fired from the North Sea from a Russian ship at The Hague courthouse."

  Ben Noble, associate professor of Russian Politics at University College London, said that in order to stay relevant and safe, Medvedev had attempted to be "even more hawkish than many existing hawks." Swedish diplomat Carl Bildt wrote on Twitter that "Even by the standards of the Putin regime, this man is distinctly unhinged." Ukraine's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba offered a blunter assessment in May 2023, saying Medvedev should drink less vodka before going on Telegram. In May 2025, when Medvedev threatened to start World War III after President Donald Trump criticised Putin, US special envoy Keith Kellogg called the comment "an unfortunate, reckless comment which is unfitting of a world power." The man who once said Russia had "exhausted its share of revolutions and social upheavals" had arrived at a very different public position.