According to Orwell, the normal mind-set of any totalitarian society is doublethink. Prison is freedom; war is peace; and black is white. The important thing is to strip things of their real names, and the rest will follow. In line with this way of thinking, Russia has today returned to totalitarianism, because the oppositional system of values is in place. The hero is the one who lost. The bad guy is the one who won. And the fact that war is peace - or, at the very least, antiterrorism - is something people have already got used to.

Khodorkovsky is not part of public life. He only appeared twice this year: once in March, when he wrote an article saying that the democrats and liberals had “lost everything”, and once in December, when he said that that the same thing had now happened to Russia’s highest officials - no liberals at all - since they’d managed to reduce economic growth to zero and to depress the stock market despite favourable economic conditions. To do this, he said, one had to a) have an inborn gift and b) do it on purpose. The result was that everyone had lost everything. Society’s morale after Beslan, Abkhazia and Ukraine is part of the same pattern, as is the proposed monetization of state benefits - and none of it can be changed by any Kremlin press-conference. So for one of these statements - or, more exactly, for both - Khodorkovsky’s our Person of the Year.

This, though, is not the most important thing. For the most important thing is that, given our current system of public values, it is better once more to be absent rather than present. The President is on TV all the time, and Khodorkovsky isn’t. He wasn’t even photographed during the course of the trial. Pugachova made Star Factory but she didn’t even get into the top ten. Kirkorov was widely talked about, but who is he? Not one of those who filled the gossip columns and appeared regularly on TV – from Petrosyan to Kleymenov - got ten points. But Parfyonov, who was fired from TV, comes in at number eight - not for his TV programme, which is more or less forgotten (we have short memories these days), but precisely for his absence from the great whirligig of life. The way things are, if we worship winners at all, then they’re always someone else’s - Yushchenko, for example.

2004 will go on record as the year of losers. Because in our current fun and games the losers are those who are morally right. Everyone understands this. And we’re sorry for Khodorkovsky, not because Russians are given to pity for prisoners - especially political ones - but because he lost the fight. He tried to object to what was going on and was beaten. I’m certain that if all this had not been about an oligarch with political views – no one would have been so sympathetic. Lots of people would have said he got what he deserved.

(D. Bykov, Sobesednik, 28.12.2005)

Vladimir Putin came second in the Sobesednik poll.