Moscow  - When Dmitry Medvedev takes the oath as Russia's third democratically elected president on May 7, the fabled "land of the Bear" will for the first time be run by a "Bear Man."

This is because Medvedev's surname stems from the Russian word for Bear, Medved.

The name has become the joyful fodder for headline puns and collage-happy magazines featuring shots like the cover of Russian newsweek that stuck Medvedev's full-cheeked face on a teddy bear.

The play off his name has revived Russia's tradition of satirical humour, called anekdoty, with jokes feeding off the contrast between ex-KGB President Vladimir Putin and his decade-younger apprentice, who seems a puppet with his soft spoken demeanor and woodenly repetitive speeches.

Anekdoty once flourished as an outlet for individual expression under tsarist or Soviet states where political dissent meant exile or imprisonment.

Popular websites and blogs are filled with bear jokes lampooning the man to be inaugurated Wednesday. In one, candy featuring a handicapped bear and Winnie the Pooh were banned after Medvedev's inauguration as defamation of an elected official.

Russian surnames built with prefixes and suffixes around root words are ripe with exploitable meanings that have left the country's leadership vulnerable for almost 1,000 years.

The tradition dates back to at least the 13th century, when the fragmented proto-state of Kievan Rus' was conquered by the unstoppable hordes of Chinghiz Khan.

The Russians became the Mongols' most turbulent vassals. Under a series of leaders such as Ivan Moneybags and Yuri Long-Arm, they won back their independence, and under legendary ruler Ivan the Terrible - or Threatening - they began the conquest of the Mongol lands.

However, Ivan the Terrible's reign of terror ended in his own death and a generation of chaos. The succeeding dynasty, the Romanovs, already had their own surname, making the succession of kings, and then tsars, much less vivid to the outsider's ear.

Nonetheless, some of their subjects maintained the trend. Catherine the Great's lover, and secret husband, Grigori Potemkin was a man whose power overshadowed much of Russia - no surprise when his name comes from the Russian word for "darkness."

But the decision to make surnames universal in the mid-19th century - a revolution in the peasant-dominated country - added dozens of names to the list and made the Russia of the last tsars a source of joy to the reader.

Legendary composer Piotr Tchaikovsky, for example, sounds decidedly domestic when his name is translated out of Russian, where it comes from the word for "tea.

And his fellow-musician, Modest Mussorgsky, sounds even more modest when you know that his name comes from the word for "rubbish.

With the rise of organized revolutionaries in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the trend took a new turn, with rebels against the tsars deliberately choosing meaningful names to help avoid the secret police.

Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, for example, took the name Lenin to name himself after the Lena river in Siberia, the place of many a political exile.

Georgian communist Josip Dhugashvili, meanwhile, dubbed himself Stalin, roughly translated as "the man of steel."

But not all names were chosen by the bearer for political impact. The etymology of Putin's name - Medvedev's predecessor as president - is unclear, but seems to come from the word "put," a journey.

The Soviet Union's most successful general, Georgi Zhukov, is unlikely to have been chosen with pride, as it means "son of a beetle."

Few of the names among Russia's current leaders bear the mark of such creativity. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, derives his name from the laurel tree, while exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky derives his from the birch.

Tennis star Anastasia Myshkina's surname means "little mouse," while fellow-star Svetlana Kuznetsova is the "smith."

But while Medvedev, Putin and their predecessors sport familiar last names, meaning lost, Russian names have always been particularly sticky on the foreign palate.

In a gaff that was an immediate YouTube hit, US presidential candidate Hilary Clinton tripped over Medvedev's name, haltingly blustering in an on-air debate "Medv... Medevd... Medevdeva ... whatever."

While in France, the pronunciation of Putin's last name is tactfully altered to ring differently than it is spelled, because read outright in French, "poutain" means whore, and more commonly replaces the expletive "fuck" of daily English usage. (dpa)