ASTANA, October 25 (Itar-Tass) —— Kazakhstan’s branch of Russia’s Moscow State University (MSU) may serve as an “intellectual bridge between young researchers from Russia and Kazakhstan,” rector of the Moscow State University Viktor Sadovnichy said on Tuesday.
“It is our top-priority task to create all conditions for that,” he told an international scientific forum entitled “Kazakhstan and the Eurasian Idea in the New World.” The forum is dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence and the 10th anniversary of the Kazakhstan branch of the Moscow State University.
Eurasian ties in the areas of education, upbringing and humanitarian cooperation are gaining an ever-growing role in the process of creating a Eurasian union, Sadovnichy noted. “In historic terms, our relations with Kazakhstan in the area of education have always had a special character, the character of cooperation, mutual recognition of common values and each other’s possibilities,” he said and stressed that the “the present-day Kazakhstan and the Moscow State University are closely linked together.”
“We highly appreciate the fact that the republic’s leaders have entrusted the Moscow State University with training highly-qualified specialists for their home country,” Sadovnichy noted. “These specialists are oriented to work in their country, they have world-class knowledge and are able to solve tasks of Kazakhstan’s industrial and innovation development, and. What is more important, to be champions and creators of modern approaches to the development of the Eurasian idea.”
The Kazakhstan branch of the Moscow State University is currently training more than 600 students in five leading university disciplines, Sadovnichy cited statistics. “In all, the Moscow State University trains more than 1,000 students from Kazakhstan. This is the second largest group of foreign students in our university,” he noted.
According to the rector of the Moscow State University, the quality of educational services offered by the Kazakhstan branch of the university is on par with that offered by any other Moscow-based department of the university. In his words, the mere fact that the number of A grade students at the university’s Kazakhstan branch is practically the same as at its Moscow-based departments testifies to the high level of education here.
The forum’s opening ceremony began with a greeting message from Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The message was read out by deputy head of the presidential administration Baglan Mailymbayev.
Seventeen years have elapsed since the time when the Moscow State University first formulated basic principles and a program to form a new integration association – the Eurasian union of states, the message said.
“In the 21st century, the idea of Eurasian integration is coming real: the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) has been operating for more than ten years, the Customs Union of Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russia has been formed and now is the core of the Common Economic Space we are beginning to form from January 1, 2012,” Nazarbayev said in the message.
According to the Kazakh president, millions of supporters of the Eurasian idea see a “great civilizing perspective” in it. “It gives our states a possibility to take a due place in the global world and helps our nations to reach a qualitatively new level of economic, cultural and humanitarian cooperation,” he stressed.
“This is our common history of future we are writing already now,” the statement said. “Its success is not merely a task for politicians, it also means a laborious work of scholars and experts, and active support from citizens of our countries.”