Plenary session of the United Cultures Forum

The event took place in the Grand Catherine Palace located in the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum and Reserve. This year's theme is Return to Culture - New Opportunities.

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Speech at the plenary session of the United Cultures Forum

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Forum participants, ladies and gentlemen, friends,

Welcome to the International United Cultures Forum. It is truly a pleasure to once again host people of art and education from different countries in Russia.

I am confident that your professional dialogue that is free from stereotypes and biased approaches will help expand cooperation and interaction between states and peoples, and embody the motto of this year's forum, Return to Culture - New Opportunities, into vibrant and highly relevant modern-day projects.

It is deeply symbolic that one of the main venues of the forum this year is here, in Tsarskoye Selo. I hope you will enjoy these marvellous masterpieces and outstanding interior decorations. The magnificence of the Catherine Palace and its park ensembles is born of the harmony of different cultural traditions and embodies the nations' ability to have the ideas unite them, and to join efforts in order to create beautiful works of art going from one generation to the next. All this serves as a remarkable evidence of the unifying and creative power of culture.

These approaches are the essence and meaning of our forum. They reflect the significance of languages, customs, and artistic heritage of each nation for the whole world, and the supreme value of their diversity, which creates harmony and forms our civilisation.

All our forums - this is the 11^th forum - asserted the core, key principle which says that the more vibrant, the more fulfilling, and the more distinctive this diversity is, the richer our common cultural heritage is and the more stable and successful the future of our planet will be.

We, in Russia, know well that national culture can thrive and get richer only in interaction with other cultures. Our country was originally formed as a multiethnic nation, and this priceless gift determined its unique cultural palette and the status of a truly great power with great art, science, and literature. By the way, creative writing is in itself an excellent environment for communication, and we are in favour of strengthening the interaction between writers from different countries.

To be continued.