Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev was shown dancing awkwardly to a pop song in a video spreading across Russian Internet on Wednesday that he said showed a reunion of his university class.
The brief clip uploaded on YouTube by an unidentified person showed the Russian leader in a suit jacket and jeans stepping and waving his hips alongside several other people to a perestroika-era hit song ‘American Boy’ with a concentrated expression on his face.
Medvedev confirmed the video is real after a blogger said on Twitter that he ‘dances like my dad!’
"We're rocking out last year at a reunion with my (university) class," Medvedev replied in his Twitter blog. "The dances/ music are those, from the past," he wrote, punctuating with smilie signs.
Not all of the comments to the video were nice, with one saying that "Medvedev is killing his rating so that Putin can reign for the next 12 years."
Others judged that Boris Yeltsin was much better on the dance floor. Russia's late first president has been filmed several times during his presidency as singing folk songs or excitedly dancing the twist on stage.
Medvedev's spokeswoman Natalia Timakova lamented to Interfax news agency that "notions of confidentiality of private life are in an embryo stage in our country," adding that Medvedev still meets with his old friends as president.
Unlike Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has never been seen dancing in public, however he played a grand piano late last year and sang a jazz classic at a gala concert.
Russia is headed for presidential elections in 2012, and neither man has ruled out running for the new six-year long term at the helm of the country.