Duma Foolishly Wants to Create an Institute for the Study of Traditional Values, El Murid Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 20 – Anna Kuznetsova, the deputy speaker of the Russian Duma, is calling for the creation of an Institute for the Study of Traditional Values so that lawmakers and others will know what values are traditional an what are not and thus will be able to promote the former and oppose the latter, Anatoly Nesmiyan who blogs under the screen name El Murid says.
    But the very idea, the blogger says, is “absurd,” an effort to create an ideology that will lead to Russia’s further degradation and one that ignores the fact that traditional values can only exist alongside other values as part of a larger moral universe (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/22418 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=6763D4F0AB59E).
    Indeed, El Murid continues, underlying this proposal is the notion that “the country should not have a future for only in that case is such an institute required.” But that won’t be the end of such absurdities. Instead, “other structures will inevitably be created to address and solve the same problem: to turn the country into a cemetery.”