People wishing to attend the concert of Nadezhda Kadysheva and the Zolotoye Koltso (Golden Ring) band in the Kremlin Palace on February 25 really had no luck. Security guards were inexorable, they let people in strictly one after another, and the toughness of personal checks resembled that in American airports after September 11. Therefore, the line of visitors nearly reached the Lenin National Library. Numerous “cool guys,” trying to skip the line, further irritated pop music fans. However, they should not have been worried. The “cool guys” were in fact the participants of the Person of the Year ceremony, which RosBusinessConsulting had decided to hold in the Palace of Patriarchs in the Kremlin this year. They had absolutely no interest in pop music that evening.

The security measures were due to the fact that traditionally, the first persons on the list of nominees (which consisted of almost forty names) were very protected citizens, such as Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, as well as such not less respectable officials as, for example, Sergey Yastzhembsky. However, none of them personally attended the ceremony. As usual, Luzhkov “had to leave on very important business at the last minute,” and Kudrin was “about to arrive” for about 40 minutes. However, after his press secretary quietly left the room, it has become clear that the finance minister, who had just become the acting finance minister, would not come to receive his award either.

However, there were a lot of VIPs at the ceremony, including very protected ones, led by Central Election Commission Chairman Alexander Veshnyakov.

Representatives of the Martel company were waiting in the lobby of the palace, offering visitors a choice of exotic cocktails containing cognac (Martel was one of the sponsors of the event). People suffering from a stomach ulcer, teetotalers and drivers were the most unlucky, as no non-alcoholic beverages were served. Yet, the abstabstainers were a minority.

Despite an impressive number of nominees, the ceremony was going rather energetically, the winners were glibly thanking the founders of the award, stressing that they were just symbols of advanced labor collectives, which the prize should have been rightfully given to.

The nominees included both well-known and merited people: Academician Vitaly Ginzburg, Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Yakovlev, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller, Aeroflot CEO Valery Okulov, businessmen Ruben Vardanian, Lev Khasis, Mikhail Kusnirovich, Oleg Tinkov, etc. and “new” people: Vladimir Kovalsky, the president of the MasterDent chain of dental clinics, Dmitry Bakatin, the general director of the Sputnik Group, Yevgeny Chichvarkin, the manager of the Euroset company, etc. Nikita Kirichenko was declared Person of the Year in the media posthumously.

After the prizes were awarded, the guests walked across the Kremlin to a drink reception in the Faceted Chamber. No security guards were noticeable during the walk. Possibly, there was no one left to guard, as Alexander Veshnyakov had left earlier.