D. Astakhov / RIA Novosti

Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, who proposed introducing a course on humanism in police academies on Tuesday and asked cultural figures on Wednesday to help teach police officers "to see the beauty in the everyday," on Thursday called for Russian children to be raised on domestic cartoons and fairy tales. "We don't need to copy any [foreign] models. We are a special country, we have many serious historical times, a lot of kindness, values that other countries don't have," Nurgaliyev said at parliamentary hearings in the Federation Council on the concept of forming a national action plan in the interests of children.

"I have often been told, and in the regions <...> bring back our animation, the fairy tales that brought us up, our heroes, on whom an entire generation grew up. It seems to me that the time has come when everything needs to be put in its place," the minister added, whose words are reported by RIA Novosti.

Children's Rights Commissioner Pavel Astakhov, who took the floor, agreed with him: Russian children should not be raised using Harry Potter as an example. "With all due respect to Harry Potter, we have our own heroes, our hero is Ivan Tsarevich," Astakhov said. In his opinion, orphanages and boarding schools should become a thing of the past, and the main goal of the state should be a careful attitude towards family values. "The main protector of the child is not the court, not the police, not the ombudsman, but the father and mother. The main goal is a careful attitude towards family values. Every child should be wanted by the family, society and the state," the ombudsman noted.

Cartoonist Yuriy Norshteyn, whose words are quoted by Ekho Moskvy, considers Nurgaliev's statement populism. According to him, it is an attempt to distract attention from the most serious internal problems of the police.

It should be noted that of the 10 Russian films that made money at the box office last year, the most profitable was the cartoon "The Three Bogatyrs and the Shamakhan Queen" with a budget of $3 million and collected $19.1 million at the box office. This year, this record was also broken by a cartoon - "Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf" collected $20.8 million. The cartoons "Alyosha Popovich and Tugarin Zmey" from 2004 and "Dobrynya Nikitich and Zmey Gorynych" from 2006 collected more than their budget, 40% of which were paid for by the Ministry of Culture. The domestic big-budget film with animation elements, The Nutcracker and the Rat King 3D by Andrei Konchalovsky, which was immediately positioned as a highly artistic and useful spectacle for children, failed at the box office, collecting only $13.8 million in Russia and $16.2 million worldwide with a budget of $90 million.

On Wednesday, Nurgaliev asked cultural figures to help teach police officers "to see the beauty in the everyday, to be a sensitive person," and psychologists to give recommendations on "normalizing the climate in teams, conditions for relaxation, and switching attention to positive emotions." According to the minister, it will take a lot of time to raise a new generation of police, "this should happen gradually, and not by breaking. Metaphorically speaking, if a weed suddenly appears among healthy ears of corn, it is simply removed by the roots, but the entire field is not plowed."

Nurgaliev's latest statements may be related to the increasing pressure on the minister in the information space. It is mainly related to the scandal with torture in the Dalniy police department in Kazan, which resulted in the death of the detainee Sergei Nazarov in late February. However, the scandal in the St. Petersburg Department of Internal Affairs has not been exhausted either, related to the scandalous dismissal of the head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, Mikhail Sukhodolsky, after the death from beatings in late January of a 15-year-old teenager suspected of robbery. Sukhodolsky is accused of fraud with 200 million rubles allocated to the state unitary enterprise Okhrana. This week, a search was conducted at Sukhodolsky's St. Petersburg apartment, and it turned out that the former head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs is in Israel. This week, information emerged through the deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Combating Corruption, Alexander Khinshtein, that Nurgaliev allegedly organized the disappearance of materials on the case of a traffic accident involving his wife Margarita, which occurred in the summer of 2010.

In this regard, Nurgaliev is reminded of the words he said last year upon completion of the transformation of the militia into the police. "There, behind me, in the past, there remained bribery, abuse of office, corruption and all the negativity, it is gone today," he said at a meeting with the personnel of the Kostroma Region UMVD. "Only the best of the best remain in the new structure."

Nurgaliev called for the revival of domestic animation