Russia's ruling party United Russia has sent a shipment of books to schools in Crimea to help children on the peninsula compensate for their lack of knowledge on Russian culture.
The books, published as a special edition under the title "100 Books of the President" as part of the the party's charity work, will be distributed to the 621 schools on the peninsula, RIA Novosti reported Thursday.
Among the works included are "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Dark Alleys" by Ivan Bunin, "The White Guard" by Mikhail Bulgakov and many more. The collection was created at the initiative of President Vladimir Putin, who instructed literary specialists to choose 100 works of Russian literature that would give each schoolchild a strong base of humanitarian knowledge about Russian culture.
State Duma Deputy Viktor Pinsky said the books would help the generation of students catch up with Russian culture after decades of having been part of Ukraine.
"These 23 years, when a part of the generation in Crimea and Sevastopol were deprived of the opportunity to study Russian history, to speak in Russian, we will compensate for that gap," Pinsky said in comments carried by RIA Novosti.
The learning process, it seems, goes both ways as Putin earlier this month ordered the inclusion of a section on Crimea in all Russian school history textbooks to arm children with "information about Crimea in the history of the Russian empire, the USSR and modern Russia."
See also:
Education Ministry Preparing Materials to Teach Children About Crimea Crisis
