This year, the entire Orthodox world commemorates Prince Vladimir on the occasion of the millennium of his death. Solemn arrangements dedicated to this event are taking place not only Russia, but also abroad. At the international scientific conference “Prince Vladimir: Sources of Wisdom, Lessons of Statehood, Principles of Spirituality,” Leonid Slutsky, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Ties with Compatriots, expressed the view that “the result of Prince Vladimir’s spiritual feat, his thoughts and his creative work, was the creation of one of the most serious and lasting political formations in the history of humanity, the united and indivisible Russian state, the Russian nation.”
Slutsky believes that “today we live in a difficult time. It harkens us in many ways back to the era when St. Vladimir lived. Today, many of our opponents work against our world, they would like us to enter into a collapse, a collapse, including a spiritual one, so the Russian language begins to decline.”
According to the MP, no language has been disappearing from the face of the planet as rapidly as the Russian language over the past century: “In 1989, 370 million people were speaking Russian. And now there are only about 250 million. This is, indeed, a tendency towards collapse. Russian schools are closing in the CIS countries, in countries fraternal to us, and especially in Ukraine, where there is now a bloody civil crisis. Even before the current phase of the crisis, from 2008 to 2013, about 650 Russian schools were closed.”
"Only one Russian school, the Pushkin school, is operating in Ashgabat, on the territory of Turkmenistan. Today, on us that are present in this room, on our generation depends whether the Russian world is rapidly developing, strengthening spiritually, continuing its march through the ages as it was bequeathed to us by Prince Vladimir, or the twenty-first century could be the era of the sunset of Russian civilization.”
Slutsky urges to turn to the precepts of Prince Vladimir and unite the Russian world: “To build and reopen Russian schools, to reach every person in the world again, whose hearts beat in unison with our hearts. On November 5-6, Moscow will host the Fifth World Congress of Compatriots, which will bring together representatives of the Russian world from all over the planet. Today we have to look at how the largest countries in the world work with compatriots and how we work. Unfortunately, we have a clear backlog here… We are responsible for gathering the Russian world, so that great Russia in the 21st century can preserve and multiply those old traditions that were once established by St. Vladimir.”
