A few years ago sociologists asked Russian citizens about the circumstances in which they had lost friends. Half of the respondents admitted that it hadn’t happened to them. One fifth of respondents said their friends had died. 9% broke friendly relations due to leaving for another place, 6% due to betrayal, 3% due to changing interests, and 2% due to money issues, misunderstanding and mistrust, or a fight.
Alexei Kondratiev, member of the Federation Council Committee on Defense and Security, thinks over the preservation and restoration of friendship on a state-wide scale: “Our national practice of international friendship differs from tolerance in the West. We must return to the term ‘friendship of peoples.’ Our country has always been united by the friendship of peoples, but not tolerance. Tolerance means non-responsiveness. This term is medical, used in transplantation, and one-hundred-percent tolerance means the patient's death. There is no immunity, so he dies.”
Alexei Kondratiev thinks that the most important component of the friendship of peoples is a settlement of the ethnic issue. According to him, “in a multinational country it makes sense to study basics of the languages that are present in the country. Otherwise, we will live in a dream world, as Europe is living today. They created for themselves a world of tolerance, universal loyalty, universal brotherhood, that does not work. People who come to them assimilate neither in French nor in German society, living by their own laws, in their own enclaves. We have always lived together; we have always been tolerant to any religion, because they have existed for many years.”
The senator urged to “help Russian Islam, because there is a pressure on it, it is under pressure. And a situation in which Islam becomes the conditional source of all diseases is wrong. I'll ask the question: what was the nationality of Said Buryatsky? [His real name was Alexander Tikhomirov, a participant of terrorist groups, an Islamist preacher, and one of ideologies of the North Caucasus armed underground; he was killed in Ingushetia - VK] In the Shelkovskiy district of Chechnya one of the emirs was someone by the name of Vladimir Smirnov. [A warlord of the Russian origin, Abu Malik, the real name is Vladimir Smirnov. He committed several heavy crimes – murders of policemen, blowing up and shooting at military cavalcades - VK]. The public should control all manifestations of society and individuals. We have begun to move away from this. We have been shrinking into ourselves for 20 years. Today it is time to join forces.”
