There’s quite a difference between how Astrakhan looked last year (I was here for the city’s anniversary celebration) and how it looks now. You can see the city growing and developing, and the dilapidated housing estates are being replaced. There are problems, of course, but the place is changing. Astrakhan really is turning into a new city. They’re doing particularly well on building new sports infrastructure and I particularly remember the newly built Zvezdny sports complex. This is a modern, multifunctional facility that’s fully equipped for many types of sport; they have a fitness club and a hall for rhythmic gymnastics. I really liked the rhythmic gymnastics hall, by the way: the training facilities there are just superb. I once came to Astrakhan as a little girl to take part in a competition. We lived in a hostel and performed in some cold hall…Nowadays it’s all completely different, which I’m really pleased to see, of course. And the main thing is that lots and lots of young people are doing sport and the halls are simply bursting at the seams. Which means there’s a demand for new facilities these days and they need to be built.

I was visiting Astrakhan with the United Russia Party to take part in the opening of a sports and health complex for students at the pedagogical university (part of the party’s “Higher Education - Healthy Lifestyle” project in the region). I met the students. They’ve been provided with some very good facilities in the sports halls where they practice – it’s all clean and cozy and the students are thrilled. They gave me a really warm welcome.

I had a fascinating meeting with some young people at the Young Journalists’ Club. We talked about the media coverage of the 65th anniversary of Victory Day. The journalists told me about the material (reports, articles, video features) they had put together for the celebration. I gave them my support and said that I thought the emotional backdrop to any report on the Victory was very important and that it was up to young journalists to carry forward the values held by the generation that won the war. If you put your heart into it, together with all your youthful drive, you can produce a real living celebration rather than just the usual lip service.

There was another trip that wasn’t scheduled and happened almost by chance. That was a visit to a maternity hospital - one of the biggest in southern Russia. It’s been partially renovated and there are two floors where everything seems OK, but I asked them to show me the parts that are still to be renovated, just to get a feel for the difference. Well, I was upset, of course. If you look at the way health care is organized in Europe, we’ve got an awful long way to go…and not just in our maternity hospitals, but in our regional infirmaries and the quality of service. There’s still an awful lot to be done.

Overall, I’m pleased with the trip to Astrakhan: we managed to do everything that we planned.