Vladimir Legoshin is known as the #1 rescue worker in Russia. He is the only living Hero of Russia among Russian rescuers.

Artemy Lebedev quit the journalism faculty at Moscow State University after studying there for just two years. Russia may have lost a journalist. But it acquired a designer. 

Boris Kozulin, 42, a teacher at Moscow’s Gymnasium #1567, could not differ more from the overblown stereotype of secondary school math teachers...

"Russia,” the proverb has it, “hinges on the Ivanovs.” (Rossiya na Ivanovykh derzhitsya.) In the case of Russia’s Olympic experience at Salt Lake City, the men’s cross-country medal hopes hinged on Mikhail Ivanov.

At 32, Sergei Boyarsky is the youngest dean in the history of the Moscow Medical Academy named for Sechenov.

Arkady Babchenko is the only Russian writer to successfully depict the Chechen war in literature. In 2001, his book of short stories, Ten Stories about the War, won the Debut Prize “For Courage in Literature.”

Hero of Russia, Emeritus Pilot, Colonel Valentin Padalka lives with his wife and two daughters in Rostov-on-the-Don. But the road to earning these distinguished titles was not an easy one: there is hardly a hot-point in the ex-USSR where he wasn’t sent during his military career (which continues still).

Yevgeny Nabokov hails from Russia’s famous Nabokov dynasty. The hockey dynasty, that is. Yevgeny’s father, Viktor, didn’t write Lolita, but tended goalie for Torpedo, in Ust-Kamenogorsk (in Eastern Kazakstan), for 18 years.

Alexander Mikhailin, a 21-year-old Muscovite, recently won the World Championship in judo, held in Germany, and thus became one of the top candidates to bear Russia’s flag at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

A lot of paper has passed through the presses since Elena Myasnikova, 43, brought Cosmopolitan magazine to Russian soil in May 1994. 

All his life, 35-year-old Vitaly Gashin has served noble goals: if in the past he saved people’s lives, now he saves their historical heritage.

While still a student in middle school, Vladimir Chuprov was touched by something he saw on television. “In the early 1980s,” he said, “I saw a frightening Greenpeace TV commercial showing a huge cargo ship throwing barrels of toxic waste onto boats full of environmentalists, whose action was targeted against the burial of toxic waste in the world’s oceans.”