By Vestnik Kavkaza
Tomorrow the seventeenth World Russian People's Council begins. The main theme of the council is "The country of Russia as a civilization. The solidarity of society and the future of the Russian people." Vsevolod Chaplin, chairman of the Synodal Department for Relations between the Church and Society, archpriest, said that today it is important to know that “Russia is a civilization on its own, which has its own views on what is happening in the world, has its social ideals; it is very important to say about solidarity, that people in modern Russian society should help each other, not to follow the path of conflict and atomization "of all against all," not to follow the path of alienation of people from different social backgrounds, different economic conditions, different nationalities, different religions; to speak about the ideal of mutual support, the ideal of social unity, which, in fact, has become the foundation of our present-day civilization.”
The participation of His Holiness Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill, heads of the presidential administration, a number of federal departments and agencies, high-level representatives of the legislature, leaders of all parliamentary factions in the State Duma as well as the prominent Russian intellectuals, journalists and public figures is expected.
“When we founded the Council, no one thought that it would reach such areas, would become so wide-spread, would become an all-Russian and even international center,” Valery Ganichev, the chairman of the Union of Russian Writers, says. “The World Russian People's Council focuses on Russia, the Russian people, our national culture, but it is not only the council of Russian peoples, it is the council of all nationalities and religions that exist on our territory. These representatives are always present at the council: Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and other faiths, many of them will be in the Presidium of the World Russian People's Council. In this sense, the WRPS is the council of all the people of Russia, all our nations and peoples.”
“After the last XVI World Russian People's Council the representatives of the Bureau of the Presidium of the council and of the secretariat of the council visited dozens of regions of the Russian Federation, visited all the federal districts from Sakhalin to Kaliningrad,” Alexander Rudakov, the head of the Expert Center of the WRPS, said. “The WRPC, remaining the largest national forum, an authoritative forum, continues its work as a permanent public organization. Each council is unique, and we know that each year the council raises the most up-to-date themes that society is preoccupied with. The organizational mission changes every year, as you remember in 2008 the Children and Youth Council represented Russian youth from all over the world. This year's characteristic feature of the XVII WPRC is that the forum will have participants from dozens of Russian regions, all the federal districts, representatives of intellectual, cultural, political and business elites of the regions, dozens of heads of subjects of the Russian Federation have been invited. It is worth mentioning that according to the tradition, the regional offices of the council always include as co-chairs one representative of the intellectual elite of the region, it can be the head of the largest regional university, or the head of a department of leading regional institutions. We are planning to actively involve the intellectual elites in the development of policy documents of the WRPS, development of the concept of national baseline values, formation of a society of.solidarity and formulation of the main goals of our Russian civilization. Therefore, we can say that this year the XVII World Russian People's Council will not be only a Moscow forum but that we will be able to hear the regions there.”
