You can’t burn also

The Ministry of Culture will understand the situation with the destruction of books published with the support of the Soros Foundation in Vorkuta. According to Interfax, the head of the department Vladimir Medinsky stated this. In his opinion, the burning of books is generally unacceptable.

"The stones of books are from the same series as the demolition of any monuments. It looks so bad and causes such strange historical associations that, in my opinion, this is completely unacceptable," the minister said.

At the same time, the agency notes, Medinsky emphasized that he was not talking about the situation with the burning of books in Vorkuta, but in principle about his attitude to such actions.

When asked if his words mean that the ministry did not instruct the destruction of these books, Medinsky said: "Are you laughing or what?"

The day before, it became known that at Vorkutinsky Mining and Economic College, 53 books from the institutions of the institution library were burned with the support of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) as part of the project "Updating humanitarian education in Russia". It is reported by "7 × 7" with reference to the official letter of the acting Minister of Education and Youth Policy of Komi Svetlana Moiseeva-Arkhipova.

In mid-December 2015, scans of letters appeared on the network sent by the deputy envoy Vladimir Putin in the North-Western Federal District Andrei Travnikov Deputy Prime Minister Komi Tamara Nikolaeva. They stated that the literature, published with the support of the Soros Foundation, "forms in the youth environment a distorted perception of domestic history and popularizes alien to the Russian ideology of the installation," and therefore it needs to be removed from libraries.

Elena Vasilieva, head of the library of Vorkutinsky Mining and Economic College, confirmed the fact of the destruction of books. They said, packed in bags and burned in the courtyard of the educational institution.

On November 30, 2015, the Soros Foundation was recognized as an “unwanted” organization . According to the official representative of the Prosecutor General Marina Gridneva, the work of the Open Society Institute "poses a threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation and the security of the state."

Earlier, on August 4 of the same year, the Deputy Minister of General and Professional Education of the Sverdlovsk region Nina Zhuravleva demanded that the directors of schools and schools of the region be removed from the libraries of their establishments by the book of English historians Anthony Bivor and John Kigan, who, among other things, affect the theme of the cruelty of the Soviet Army in relation to the civilian population of Germany. The official explained her demand by the fact that in these books "the stereotypes formed during the Third Reich are promoted." The fact of issue of publications by the Soros Foundation was emphasized especially.