On April 22 the head of Crimea, Sergey Aksenov, has signed a decree on the feasibility of establishing a Crimean Tatar public broadcasting company. 177 million rubles has been reserved in the federal budget for the creation of the channel. According to Sergei Aksyonov, in recent years the Crimean Tatar segment of the information space of the republic has been largely monopolized by the private media holding ATR, which used its monopoly position for political manipulation, trying to create an impression in the international community that the government is allegedly depriving the Crimean Tatar people from accessing information in their native language and pursuing dissidents. "There is a great need for the development of the Crimean Tatar media. There is a Crimean Tatar department at the first Crimean Channel, but this is not enough. The creation of the Social Crimean Tatar Television Channel will be an important step in the implementation of the Decree of the President of Russia on April 21, 2014 'On the Rehabilitation of the Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Crimean Tatar and German peoples and State Support for their Revival and Development', Aksenov says.
As suggested by the chairman of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation on the harmonization of interethnic and interreligious relations, Iosif Diskin, "today, Russia is experiencing a process of huge transformation, in which the former social mechanisms are gone, and they cannot be returned by any accusations and spells. And at the same time, it is an important process for our discussion, when a huge number of people are looking for their own identity, including national, cultural."
Diskin pointed to the collapse of the status of culture in general in Russian society: "Culture is no longer a social regulator. Culture ceased being a mechanism for increasing upward mobility, social status. You can be a successful banker and a culturally wild man today, which was impossible for many centuries in Russia.Today it is vitally important to discuss the social role of culture in Russian society – that is why the status of culture is falling, why high culture has ceased to be a subject of public discussion."
Diskin said that there is a need for a dialogue with the national-cultural autonomy, so that national languages will become a subject of parental care, recreation of supplementary education system, where children will be taught national languages. "Once, I was one of the authors of the law "On the languages of the peoples of the USSR", one of the last laws to be accepted by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and which were not implemented. During discussions on this topic, wonderful things were said: the language must feed the speakers. It is hard enough for a language to feed native speakers. But the social status of boys and girls who know their national language, is the real deal, and it must be done."
