English Summary
Люди года 2016
Editor’s Letter
Documenting History
Of course we’re not making history. Journalists rarely do that. The publication of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers, after which President Nixon was impeached — that made history. The Thousand Hills Radio broadcast that spurred Hutus to slaughter Tutsis in Rwanda — that’s a way of making a different kind of history. Russian long-form writer Danil Turovsky’s articles, which helped bring down the homophobic movement “Occupy Pedophilia” — that’s how history is made in Russia. Perhaps on a lesser scale than with Nixon or the genocide of the Tutsis, but nonetheless.
We don’t make history. But we document it very carefully. Each year in October, GQ magazine puts out an issue that helps you reconstruct what happened that year, just like the rings on the stump of an ancient oak tree. The oak tells you how much sun and rain there was. GQ tells you what people did that year, which films they watched, music they listened to, what they talked about. The October issue of GQ is like a time capsule. If you were to roll it up into a tube and launch it into far-off space, it would serve as an ideal reflection of all of Russian culture in 2016.
We write history down, but history is made by our heroes. The writer Boris Minaev weaves his novels from material that is simultaneously soft and tough — they’ll survive the test of time, just like the tapestries in Yusupovsky Palace. The Mikhalkov-Vereshchagin-Zlatopolsky team creates a new blockbuster every three years, luring to movie theaters people who almost never go. The restaurateur Zarkov regularly makes Moscow a highlight on the global food scene. The businessman Magomedov might build a new Ilon Musk-esque hyperloop,