Dmitry Medvedev walks towards a polling station with wife Svetlana in Moscow on Sunday. (Reuters)

Moscow, March 2: Two-thirds of Russians voting in today’s presidential election are expected to back Dmitry Medvedev as Vladimir Putin’s successor in the country’s most predictable poll since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Medvedev, the low-key first deputy Prime Minister and chairman of the state-run Gazprom gas monopoly, was effectively hand-picked by Putin, who will step sideways into the post of Prime Minister.

The election will guarantee that the popular Putin continues to wield great influence over the Russian government, to the fury of the fractured Opposition which was unable to field a convincing challenger and urged other world leaders not to recognise Medvedev’s election.

But the other driving force in Medvedev’s unexpected rise to Russia’s highest office is his wife, Svetlana, who will today become Kremlin’s First Lady in waiting. Diplomats and western officials have begun scrutinising her, as well as her husband, for clues as to how Russia will be run when he takes over in May.

The couple were childhood friends and high school sweethearts before they eventually became husband and wife. The steely 42-year-old Svetlana is widely believed to have provided much of the drive that has helped propel her husband — once a mild-mannered law lecturer — to the very top of Russia’s political tree.

Sociable and energetic, she is credited with forging the contacts that enabled her husband to break out of academia and into the world of commerce, a move which propelled him into Putin’s path and eventually to the very top of Russia’s political tree.

She helped draw him into the Russian Orthodox Church, an institution which has endorsed him in the presidential poll, and is thought to have been the friend with whom he was baptised, aged 23, at St. Petersburg Cathedral.Now she is expected to be an influential presence behind the scenes at the Kremlin, as well as providing what he calls “a solid and dependable rearguard”.

Russia’s new first couple, who are of the same age, met at elementary school in St. Petersburg and eventually married in 1989. Svetlana’s parents provided a home for the couple, allowing them to share their cramped St. Petersburg flat. Eventually she prodded him to form the contacts needed to move into the more lucrative world of commerce, becoming a director of timberfirm, Pulp Ilim, in the mid-1990s.

A source close to them said: “he was happy, really, writing books on law and working at the state university in St. Petersburg, but she had the contacts from her social life and she pushed him into the timber company. Everything he has done, she has helped and supported him in.”

Another friend added: “I don’t think he could have got that job on his own, even though he’s incredibly capable. But he’s easy going. He liked his fish and his aquarium and his local football club. He needed Svetlana’s drive to push himself forward.”

Stung by the Opponents’ taunts that her husband looked “like a scholar fresh from the library”, Svetlana is credited with Medvedev’s recent weight loss and increasingly muscular appearance — achieved by making her husband learn yoga, go to the gym and swim nearly a mile,twice a day.

Her first teacher, Vera Smirnova, said: “Svetlana comes from a family of servicemen. In high school she was the number one beauty — a blonde with amazing eyes. Many boys liked her but she chose Dmitry.”

With her own degree in finance and economics, Svetlana could have had her own career. But with her husband earning good money from Pulp Ilim, she immersed herself in social work — for which the orthodox Church gave her a medal.