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New meridional routes should be built, connecting southern Siberia with the Northern Sea Route, leading to China and through it to Southeast Asia. The Urals and western regions of Siberia should be given effective access to India, other countries of South Asia and the Middle East. Encouragingly, work has finally begun, albeit belatedly, on the railway that will link Russia, including the Siberian regions, to the Indian Ocean via Iran.
It is necessary to develop Siberia with its water resources, involving water-scarce, but labor-abundant Central Asian countries.
The wider shortage of labor should be partly compensated by the mass attraction of hard-working and disciplined North Koreans. We are finally getting out of foolishly following the Western line on the DPRK and restoring friendly relations. I know that India and Pakistan are interested in providing at least seasonal workers.
We at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, together with the Institute of Economics and Industrial Production Organization of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, other institutes of the Siberian and Far Eastern Branches of the Academy of Sciences, universities of Tomsk, Barnaul, Khabarovsk, Krasnoyarsk, are starting a project to justify the project Turn to the East – 2 – towards the Siberization of Russia.
We also need a national program for the development of Oriental studies, knowledge of Oriental languages, peoples and cultures in schools. Uniquely, culturally and religiously open Russia has a huge competitive advantage here, inherited from its ancestors who, unlike the Europeans, did not enslave and destroy but absorbed local peoples and cultures as they moved eastwards.
Sun Tzu, Confucius, Kautilya (or Vishnugupta), Rabindranath Tagore, Ferdowsi, King Darius, Tamerlane, al-Khozremi (the founder of algebra), Abu Ali ibn Sina (Avicenna – the founder of medical science) or Fatima al-Fihri – the founder of the world’s first university – should be as familiar to an educated Russian as Alexander the Great, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli or Goethe. We need to understand the essence not only of Orthodox Christianity, but also of Islam and Buddhism. All these religions and spiritual movements are already present in our spiritual memory. We just need to preserve and develop them.
In addition, with the inevitable climate change in the coming decades, Siberia will expand the area of comfortable habitat. Nature itself is inviting us to a new Siberian eastward shift of Russia. I repeat once again, by creating and implementing the program of Russia’s eastward shift, we are not only returning to the source of our power and greatness, but we are also opening new horizons for ourselves and future generations, we are creating and implementing the reborn Russian dream: the aspiration for the greatness of the country, prosperity and will – Russian freedom, to embody the best in us – the Russian spirit.
This article was first published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, translated and edited by the RT team
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