Alexander Yakovenko wrote in Rossiiskaya Gazeta's Wednesday issue, in an article dedicated to the 1,000th anniversary of Kazan (capital of Tatarstan) and the coming September meeting of UN leaders in New York, that Russia was ready to actively participate in working out a civilization interaction strategy.
He said conducting constructive inter-civilization dialogue would be "an efficient response to new global challenges and threats."
Linking the New York summit and the 1,000th anniversary of Kazan, the diplomat said Kazan had long been a place where "the dialogue of two civilizations dominates over religious and ethnic intolerance and turns into a basis of Russian statehood and, to a certain extent, a symbol of a successful model of federalism."
Yakovenko said Russian experience obviously showed that talk about the clash of civilizations and the fundamental incompatibility of Islam and Christianity was politically biased and easily refuted by the course of Russia's history.
