MONACO, January 14. /TASS/. Monaco’s Minister of State and President of the Governing Council Michel Roger begins a visit to Moscow on Wednesday. The aim of the visit is to promote closer partnership between Monaco and Russia.
Roger will be accompanied by a group of politicians, businessmen and scientists. While in the Russian capital, he plans to meet with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to discuss prospects for further cooperation. Other members of the Monacan delegation will have separate meetings with their Russian counterparts.
The Monacan head of government will speak at the Gaidar Forum, a major annual international scientific conferences in the field of economy, opening on Wednesday in Moscow. The forum, organized by the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and the Gaidar Foundation, provides a unique intellectual platform and a meeting point for theorists and practitioners, the world’s leading scientists and politicians and influential representatives of global financial and business elites. This year’s topic will be “Russia and the World: The New Vector.”
The visit of the Monacan cabinet head is held shortly after the opening of the Year of Russia in Monaco. The festival embracing arts, culture, business relations and research cooperation is held in line with an agreement between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Monaco’s ruling Prince Albert II.
“The festival will make it possible to remind of the historic ties between us,” Michel Roger said in a televised interview with Mikhail Gusman, TASS’ first deputy director general. Relations between the two countries were established in the mid-19th century by representatives of Russia’s Romanov dynasty and Monaco’s House of Grimaldi.
Roger said there was huge interest to Russia, its history and cultural heritage in his country. “Now our schoolchildren have a possibility to study the Russian language - at a college and a lycee,” he said. “It has become possible thanks to growing mutual exchanges.”
The beginning of the Year of Russia in Monaco was marked by Bolshoi Ballet’s The Taming of the Shrew. The pet project of The Bolshoi and Monaco’s choreographer Jean Christophe Maillot was performed to full house on one of the biggest stages of Monte Carlo, the Grimaldi Forum Monaco, on three nights.
A spokesperson for Grimaldi Forum told TASS Jean Christophe Maillot had decided to dedicate his new ballet to Russian ballet star Maya Plisetskaya. In late 1970s, choreographer Maurice Bejart staged in Monaco the ballet Isadora especially for Plisetskaya. Maillot so far keeps in secret details of his new project dedicated to the famous ballerina.
Other events to be organized within the Year of Russia will include visits to Monaco by Russian sailing ships, arts exhibitions, numerous meetings between people of art and science, representatives of business circles. In all, the programme includes more than 140 various projects. “In other words, everything is being done to know present-day Russia better,” the Monacan head of government underscored.
Also, Roger will speak to journalists at a news conference at TASS on January 15. The current visit to Russia “is a good chance to tell Russian society about economic, cultural, educational and tourism possibilities of Monaco,” a source in the Monacan delegation said.