Alexander Gelman — A survivor of the Holocaust during childhood, Gelman became a playwright and screenwriter after working as a newspaper journalist in Leningrad in the 1960s, winning the USSR State Prize in 1976. He has resided in Moscow since 1978.Gelman graduated from a vocational school in Chernovtsy, Ukrainian SSR in 1951 and attended a naval school in Lvov (Lviv) in 1952–1954 and became an officer in the Soviet Navy, serving between 1954 and 1960 in the Black Sea Fleet's coastal defense and on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Soviet Far East. He also worked in factories and in construction.In 1966 he moved to Leningrad, where he worked as a journalist for the municipal newspapers Smena (The Work Shift) and Stroitelny Rabochy (Construction Worker). During this period he started learning and working on screenwriting.His career reached an early peak with the 1974 play Protokol odnogo zasedaniya (Minutes of a Meeting, also translated as A Party Committee Meeting) and staged in Leningrad at the Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater by Georgy Tovstonogov and a year later at the Moscow Art Theatre by Oleg Yefremov; it was filmed in 1975 as Premiya (Salary Bonus). It depicted a construction crew's rejection of a salary bonus on the grounds that they felt cheated by bad management and poor workplace organization.[2] Acclaimed as a sociological drama, the film won director Sergey Mikaelyan and screenwriter Gelman the USSR State Prize in 1976. Many people called Protokol odnogo zasedaniya prophetic, "presaging the strikes of summer 1980 and the workers' movement in Poland."

Mikhail Aldashin — Mikhail Aldashin was born in 1958 in the town of Tuapse, Krasnodar Krai. In 1987 he graduated fr om VGIK (The Russian State University of Cinematography) as a life-action film art director. In 1989 he finished scriptwriting and film making course, where he studied under supervision of Yuriy Norshtein, Eduard Nazarov and Andrey Khrzhanovsky. The first film he participated in as an animator was Kele (1988, Soyuzmultfilm studio). From 1989 to 2077 he was employed at the Moscow animation studio Pilot, wh he directed a number of animated films, among which The Nativity (1996) and Bugs (2002) have received international recognition. Mikhail Aldashin teaches art direction at the Animation School and Studio (SHAR Studio).

Boris Minaev — Окончил факультет журналистики МГУ в 1981 году. Диплом назывался — «Гоголь в зеркале русской критики» — в нём Минаев использовал не публиковавшиеся при советской власти тексты Бердяева, Розанова, Мережковского и других русских философов, как он сам вспоминает, «не потому что такой умный, а потому что писал его на кафедре критики, где руководителем научным был выдающийся человек, главный редактор журнала „Континент“ И. И. Виноградов».Своим учителями в эссеистике и журналистике считает Юрия Щекочихина и Льва Аннинского.