The President will close the “political” 2022 with a meeting of the State Council on Youth Policy

On Thursday, December 22, President Vladimir Putin will hold a meeting of the State Council in the Kremlin on the implementation of youth policy in modern conditions. The meeting of the State Council for the first time in a long time will be held in person. Moreover, according to Vedomosti’s interlocutor close to the presidential administration (AP), this can be considered the final major event in 2022, which the head of state will visit.

On Thursday, before the meeting of the State Council, which he also heads, the president will visit an exhibition in the Manezh, where stands of key youth projects of the organization supervised by the Presidential Administration “Russia is a country of opportunities”, #MYVESTE, “Stud.Space”, and will also communicate with young people, said Vedomosti has another interlocutor close to the Presidential Administration. After that, Putin will hold a meeting of the State Council in the Kremlin. Vedomosti sent a request to the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov about whether the head of state plans to visit the Manege.

According to this source of Vedomosti, important decisions in the field of youth policy will be announced at the State Council, for the implementation of which the president will give appropriate instructions. Taking into account the fact that young people were affected by the consequences of the military special operation, this topic for the meeting of the State Council can be called symbolic, says the first source of Vedomosti: it is no coincidence, he believes, that Putin can separately discuss problematic topics before the end of the year with the relevant ministers who are responsible for the youth.

“In order to truly defeat the enemy, you need to raise his children. Therefore, the topic of youth policy is important. They cannot defeat us at the moment, so we need to educate ourselves so that they do not do this through our young people, ”one of the members of the State Council told Vedomosti. According to him, the President will be presented with new measures and mechanisms for the implementation of state policy in this area. For example, “service learning” in universities, when students are engaged in helping people in their specialty.

The press service of the Kremlin reported that the head of the YNAO Dmitry Artyukhov, head of the State Council Commission on Youth Policy, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, head of Rosmolodezh Ksenia Razuvaeva will make reports at the meeting. It is planned that proposals will be presented on the development of a new Strategy for the implementation of youth policy in Russia until 2030.

The last time a meeting of the large State Council in person was held on December 26, 2019 (that is, before the very concept of the State Council was inscribed in the Constitution) and was devoted to the implementation of agrarian policy. After that, meetings of the Presidium of the State Council were mainly held, only on December 23, 2020, the President held a joint meeting of the State Council and the Presidential Council for Strategic Development and National Projects. Due to the pandemic, it was held via videoconferencing.

The State Council is important because it involves both the governors and the government and the legislature in the discussion and further implementation of the decisions made, Artem Metelev, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Youth Policy and a member of the working group on preparing the upcoming State Council, told Vedomosti. “Before the State Council, many heads of regions, experts, representatives of relevant departments discussed potential decisions that could be taken as a result of the State Council,” he says. In addition, the preparation of the council is based on research in this area, analytics, adds Metelev, and the last State Council on this topic was held 14 years ago.

In his opinion, after the adoption of the law on youth policy in 2020, in fact, an industry appeared in which people work, coordinating state policy in relation to 40 million people. Among the topics that can be discussed at the State Council are the employment of young people, support for activists, volunteers, prevention of destructiveness and extremism, support for college students’ initiatives, development of the infrastructure of youth centers in municipalities, as well as the need for interdepartmental coordination on this topic.

“And of course the work of the new movement of children and youth. Important decisions can be expected on this topic. And in general, we can expect landmark decisions that will help young people and those who work in this industry,” says Metelev. Among other expectations, according to him, that the governors will be more closely involved in this topic, although youth policy departments have already appeared in more than half of the regions, “but there is not much attention.”

“It is important for governors that young people stay in their regions, create families there, find work,” he notes. Metelev emphasizes that the whole of December, in fact, was devoted to the topic of youth policy, various events were held in the Manezh, “this shows that youth policy is a priority for the state, especially after it began to be discussed in the Constitution, therefore it is logical, that this month will end with the State Council with the participation of the head of state.”

On Wednesday, December 21, the Moscow Manezh hosted the traditional seminar-meeting of the commission on the implementation of youth policy in front of the State Council, which was attended by governors, Kremlin employees, members of the government, representatives of youth and children’s movements, etc. Artyukhov said that among the areas of work in The sphere of youth policy requires attention at the state level: youth infrastructure and personnel in the industry, social lifts for youth, work with participants in the educational process, civic engagement and volunteering, youth employment, patriotic education in a military special operation, development of the youth media environment, prevention of destructive manifestations.

Proposals on Thursday at a meeting of the State Council will be presented to Putin.

In the same place, in the Manezh, on December 18-20, the first congress of a new movement of children and youth was held, the law on the creation of which was adopted by the State Duma and signed by the president in July 2022. At the congress, the name of the organization, “Movement of the First”, was approved after two attempts. On December 13, 37-year-old Deputy Minister of Education and Science Grigory Gurov was appointed chairman of the board of the movement.

Young people represent a large social group, which includes more than 40 million people, and this is the basis of human capital, says Konstantin Kostin, head of the Civil Society Development Fund. “And any state that is going to win this competition is interested in young people being healthy, well-educated, with the right value and ideological attitudes, so that they have the opportunity to work and develop in their country, and that conditions are created for this,” Kostin says. The ongoing military special operation does not cancel development tasks, he adds.

Maxim Ivanov took part in the preparation of the material