Identified and awarded

For its 20th anniversary, the Ekho Moskvy radio station named the newsmakers of each year for the last two decades

“Everyone meets here, as in the other world,” Alexander Blok once said when he met Anna Akhmatova in the theater dining room. We have long been accustomed to the fact that "Echo of Moscow" in our modern reality is just such a "dining room", ...

“Everyone meets here, as in the other world,” Alexander Blok once said when he met Anna Akhmatova in the theater dining room. We have long been accustomed to the fact that Echo of Moscow in our modern reality is just such a “dining room” - it can gather at the same time, in the same place people who are simply unimaginable to imagine together. At the Information Leader of the Year award ceremony at the Oktyabr cinema on Novy Arbat, everything was exactly like that.

First, the “President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was invited to the stage. "Veterans" of the radio station Sergei Korzun, Sergei Buntman and others in turn confessed their love and respect to him, because the radio station itself would not exist if it were not for the era of glasnost. Gorbachev, according to the calculations of "Echo of Moscow", became the information leader for 1990; Boris Yeltsin was named the leader of the next, 1991. The wife of Boris Nikolaevich, Naina Iosifovna Yeltsina, rose to receive the award - a golden statuette made by Tsereteli. Further - alternately, sequentially over the years, the same award was received by: Yegor Gaidar (handed over to the daughter of Maria), Viktor Gerashchenko (received the award personally), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (handed over to his wife Natalya Dmitrievna), Viktor Chernomyrdin (received Vladimir Ryzhkov as "a former party ally ”), Alexander Lebed (presented to his daughter Ekaterina), Anatoly Chubais (received by Yevgeny Yasin), Sergei Kiriyenko (personally), Yevgeny Primakov (one of the hosts of the ceremony Yury Kobaladze promised to personally hand over the prize), Vladimir Putin (Mikhail Barshchevsky was for him ), German Gref and Leonid Roshal (both were not present in person, friends and colleagues promised to pass it on), Mikhail Khodorkovsky (handed over to his mother, Marina Filippovna), Ruslan Aushev (in person), Mikhail Zurabov (received by an Ekho employee, promising to pass it on), Anna Politkovskaya (presented to the children of Ilya and Vera), Patriarch Alexy (presented to Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who accepted the award, as it was said, “with the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia), Dmitry Medvedev (received Alexei Venediktov, stating that the prize would wait Acting President in the studio "Echo" "and we'll talk to him there"), Anatoly Serdyukov (given to a colleague of the winner) ...

Each of those who went on stage sincerely thanked the radio station-anniversary…

Thank you for celebrating my son at such a difficult time for the press. This is courage, and thanks to everyone who has now applauded for so long - I understand this as support, - Marina Filippovna, the mother of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said from the stage and added: - I always listen to Ekho Moskvy radio, even in the bathroom, and now they gave me battery-operated receiver, which means I will listen to you on walks.

“Thank you for remembering your mother on your anniversary, at least within the framework of 2006,” Vera Politkovskaya said.

She said this from the stage, and after the end of the ceremony, in a conversation with me, she explained:

— Of course, we all respect Ekho Moskvy, and it is clear that they have chosen this way to mark different people. But by awarding Mom as the information leader of 2006, it turns out that we were practically awarded the prize for her death. That is, it turns out that if all this terrible had not happened in 2006, the prize would not be here now ...

"Death is more universal than life - everyone dies, but not everyone lives," said Andrew Sachs. If Anna Politkovskaya had not lived the way she lived, her death would hardly have shocked humanity all over the globe as it does now. The whole world continues to reward her with the most prestigious and authoritative awards. But in Russia, the award "Echo of Moscow" - "Information Leader of the Year 2006" - is the first after her death ...

- Many objected to me and did not agree with the persons. Someone said: “Why reward Gref?” Ruslan Aushev's choice was incomprehensible to someone, Alexey Venediktov told me. - And we took a year, and it turned out that most of all references in this particular period were precisely these people. Well, sorry, we were just recording, it doesn’t matter what and who said at the very beginning, in the end, these people turned out to be important. We didn't come up with this, we came up with it to fix it.

Opening the ceremony, Alexei Venediktov explained:

“We reward people who go down in the history books, trust me. I am a school teacher, there are no former teachers, I know that they will all be in the history books.