Viktor Zubkov (Âè́êòîð Àëåêñǻåâè÷ Çóáêî́â) was born on Sept. 15, 1941, in the village of Arbat in the Sverdlovsk region. After World War II, Zubkov's family moved to Monchegorsk, in the Murmansk region, and the young Viktor attended school there.

Education: Economics, Leningrad Agriculture Institute, 1965. Ph.D., St. Petersburg Mining Institute, 2000.

1966-1967: Served in the armed forces

1967-1985: Collective farm manager in the Leningrad region

1967-1991: Member of the Communist Party

1985: Appointed head of Priozersk, the commercial center of the district where his farms were located

1989: Appointed first deputy head of the Leningrad region's executive committee; he lost the job two years later when the Soviet Union collapsed

1992-1993: Served under Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg's foreign relations committee for 10 months

1993-1999: Deputy head of the Federal Tax Service, head of the St. Petersburg Tax Inspectorate

1999: Unsuccessfully ran for Leningrad governor, coming in fourth place with 8.64 percent of the vote in elections won by Valery Serdyukov. Boris Gryzlov, now head of United Russia, was his campaign manager.

1999-2001: Deputy tax minister, head of the St. Petersburg Department of the Tax Ministry

2000: Headed a St. Petersburg initiative group that supported Putin's presidential bid

2001-2004: First deputy finance minister and acting chairman of the Financial Monitoring Committee, which fought money laundering. Zubkov joined the agency as the Kremlin began a campaign against the wealthy businessmen who had made fortunes through controversial privatization deals in the 1990s. A highlight of Zubkov's career was Russia's removal from a blacklist drawn up by the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that combats money laundering (story).

2004-2007: Head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Committee, which was renamed the Federal Financial Monitoring Service of the Finance Ministry.

2007-2007: Prime minister, replacing Mikhail Fradkov, who became head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Zubkov was considered a top candidate to succeed President Putin.

May 2008-present: First deputy prime minister. He is in charge of national agriculture projects, fisheries, forests, trade and tariffs, according to the government's web site.

2008-present: Chairman of the board of directors of Gazprom, replacing Dmitry Medvedev

Zubkov is married and has a daughter. His daughter is married to Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.