Vladimir Kramnik does not ride the Moscow metro. He does not have a Moscow registration permit and fears being picked up by the police.

Born in April 1972 into a family of research scientists, Nikolai Lugansky was five when his innate musicality appeared, to the utter astonishment of his parents.

Amalia Mordvinova’s beauty is undeniable. Her luxurious mop of red hair and deep emerald eyes evoke the heroines of Titian’s canvasses.

There are lots of funny stories circulating about actor Yevgeny Mironov: on a cold winter night a few years ago, he took pity on a drunkard and tried to help him stand on his own feet.

For over a year, Zemfira’s name has been everywhere ... on the radio, on billboards, spray-painted on buildings. Her face is emblazoned on the chest of every teenager and twenty-something in Moscow. Her bellowing, beckoning voice floods the radio waves.

It takes an extraordinary singer to bridge the divide between popular singing and opera. The round-faced blond tenor of the Bolshoi, 24-year-old Nikolai Baskov, is just such a singer.

In Alexei Uchitel’s new film, His Wife’s Diary, 33-year-old Galina Tyunina plays Vera Nikolaevna, the long-suffering wife of the Nobel laureate poet Ivan Bunin (Bunin forced his wife to allow his lover, the poet Galina Plotnikova, to live with them). And yet Tyunina does not see her character as some kind of a martyr worthy of canonization.

Stereotypically, Russian brokers at the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (MICEX) are wedded to their mobile phones and drive swanky inomarkas (foreign-made cars). Broker Konstantin Vorontsov does not fit this mold. The affable, handsome 29-year-old sports a student’s rucksack and apologizes for being late for a meeting: “buses don’t come on time these days.”

Some might say that Tagir Yapparov, 38, is a typical self-made Russian businessman. But, in fact, he is anything but typical.

Nastya Yefimenko will try to tell you she is just a pre-med student. But the 17-year-old will only be revealing part of the story. For she was recently named the Best Young Scientist in Russia.

Mikhail Zrelov, 27, sort of “fell into” the restaurant business. If anything, his schooling and first professional experiences seemed to suggest anything but the food service industry.

If Anna Belova looks to you a lot like Vera Gregorieva on the facing page, don’t be surprised. Not only are they sisters, they are twins. And they are both neurologists.