It turned out at the meeting in the Kremlin that Russian President Vladimir Putin (shaking the hand of Channel One’s director general Konstantin Ernst) closely watches TV.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Vladimir Putin Touches Culture
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the members of the Council for Culture and Arts on Wednesday. They discussed ways to return both culture and arts to their condition of 1980s. Kommersant’s special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov brings the details from the St. Catherine’s Hall of the Kremlin.
After his meeting with the prime minister, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the session of the Council for Culture and Arts. The president expressed regret that “people are losing the skill of expressing their thoughts vividly and concisely” nowadays.
However, it turned out that he meant young people, first of all. The share of the Internet’s part devoted to education makes up 0.8 percent. Apparently, the Internet interests Vladimir Putin more and more.
“For over 15 years, our young people have lived in the conditions of mass cultural influence of foreign substitutes,” said Putin. “It is time to immune them against these substitutes.”
The president did not say that it concerns administrative measures, and after the session, high-placed sources in the Kremlin insisted it was not by accident that Putin touched upon it so softly. That is, he could have spoken of it in a completely different way. For instance, like he spoke about the role of Russian television in the process.
“Television does not always play a positive role,” Putin went on.
Apparently, this point of the agenda was not in his speech, for he spoke extremely vividly on the issue:
“They buy whatever abroad, if only cheaper.”
Director general of Channel One Konstantin Ernst, at whom both the president and I looked at the moment, seemed to have thoroughly noted down this statement of Putin, without disclosing his own attitude to it, at the same time.
Yet, Ernst and his colleagues will apparently take measures now, and TV channels will keep buying whatever abroad (for there seems to be nothing else), but at a more expensive price already. This way, Putin’s wish to change the situation will be satisfied.
However, Putin might have sacrificed this phrase of his (the only one about television, during the entire time while journalists were present at the session) to the public opinion, under the burden of which the president stives every time when asked about the strangle of violence and bad taste on Russian television.
“Schools of art education are especially important for the moral upbringing of the younger generation,” underlined Putin, and nothing could be added to the statement.
Member of the presidential council Daniil Dondurei (editor-in-chief of Cinema Art magazine) read out a rather long report, of which, however, neither the council members, nor journalists were tired, because Dondurei was reading really well, with suitable intonation in proper places.
Thus, he tragically intoned the fact that the financing of culture is inevitably reducing: from 1.2 percent of GDP in 2005 to 0.8 percent in 2008-2010.
The next intoned place concerned an even more delicate issue.
“So far, the Socialist past has not been reconsidered yet,” said Dondurei. “Sixty-eight percent of population speak of Socialism with regret…The 1990s are being discredited.”
This thought was new and important. It is indeed happening, and the funeral of the first Russian president Boris Yeltsin, which were to remind who is who to the country, failed to break that wave.
“There is nobody with whom to discuss the enormous influence of TV content on the country’s economic development,” Dondurei said bitterly.
However, considering Putin’s phrase about TV, there was at least one such person sitting together with Dondurei at the same table on Wednesday.
According to Dondurei’s estimations, bookstores are only in several large Russian cities, that is, the majority of the population does not read books, for there are not enough libraries either.
Then Dondurei spoke like someone still mentally living in those years which he asked to reconsider. He suggested solving all those problems by means of the federal budget.
“It is necessary to reconstruct the Soviet system of art education,” he urged.
Besides, he said that once the population’s cultural level goes up (at least a little), the “demographic crisis will disappear by itself, without financing”.
The last statement whetted Putin. It touched one of his favorite national projects: the welfare aid of 250,000 rubles for a second child. Dondurei should better not say that, if he wanted to be heard in all other issues.
“Right, children get born without financing,” Putin responded immediately. “Yet, the crisis is a social-economic phenomenon.”
Here Dondurei had nothing to say in response, for might makes right.
Valery Fokin, artistic director of Pushkin Russian State Academic Theater of Drama, told the president about the absorbing and mysterious Internet.
“All kinds of people come in there, and all kinds of people come out!” he exclaimed. “It is communication, live journals, interest groups which connect and don’t connect… If we do not enter the Internet, we will miss the chance to transfer high culture!”
To a long distance, he forgot to say, at the speed of 5,000 kilobits per second.
Andrei Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of May 31, 2007
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