The Ministry of Regional Development will spend 1.5 billion rubles on tolerance centers

Since 2014, the Ministry of Regional Development has been planning to start the construction of “tolerance centers” throughout Russia, in which everyone will be able to study the culture and traditions of the peoples of Russia, Izvestia reports with reference to the statement of the head of the department Igor Slyunyaev. Such sites will appear in 11 regions: in St. Petersburg, Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Irkutsk, as well as in Birobidzhan. According to the minister, the implementation of the program will require 1.5 billion rubles. The first centers will open by the beginning of 2015.

According to Slyunyaev, all sites will be built according to a standard project. The main task is to "revive the traditions of mutual respect and peaceful coexistence that have always been characteristic of Russia."

“Such centers will help to conduct a dialogue, discuss complex problems, talk about how Russians live in Dagestan, or Jews in the Far East, or Ukrainians in Tatarstan. We need to tell more about religion, culture, traditions and return to our origins again - we are one people who always lived as one family,” the minister said.

The head of the Federation of Jewish communities of Russia, Alexander Beard, who is involved in the discussion of the concept of the project, explained that the work of centers will not be associated only with the training of tolerant attitude to various religious denominations - we are talking about tolerance in the broadest sense of the word.

It is planned that the typical center will consist of two or three premises, in one of which they will install a screen for viewing plots with examples of tolerant and non-wealth behavior. In addition, there will be places for discussions and interactive voting based on the results of viewing teaching materials, the beard explained. Another hall will be adapted for exhibitions on the topics under discussion.

The Ministry of Regional Development began to prepare the concept of tolerance centers after President Vladimir Putin in October 2012 prepared an instruction to develop the federal target program "Strengthening the unity of the Russian nation and the ethnocultural development of the peoples of Russia" for a period from 2014 to 2018.

Prior to this, the question of interethnic consent in Russia was raised in the election article by Vladimir Putin, which stated the need to create an agency responsible "for the questions of national development, interethnic well -being, the interaction of ethnic groups." In the summer of 2012, the Presidential Council was created on interethnic relations, and by the end of the year the concept of interethnic relations was adopted until 2020.