#1 - JRL 8022
PRESIDENT OPENS WEBSITE FOR CHILDREN

MOSCOW, January 19, 2004 (RIA Novosti) - On Monday, President Vladimir Putin opened a website for children, www.uznai-prezidenta.ru. The site is called The Russian President to School-Age Citizens.

It took 18 months to create the site, the idea that belongs to an 11-year-old girl, Veronika Petukhova from Kaluga, Central Russia. The girl approached the president with this proposal in June 2002.

The effort involved 12 persons. The website is composed of five main sections entitled President, State, Democracy Lessons, the Kremlin, Emergency Aid. School children aged 8 to 13 are expected to make the website audience.

Three folktale characters will help kids learn more about the president. The contents of the sections depend on the choice of a character. Children will find information on the form of government, the Constitution, the history of governments, all in plain Russian, as well as games.

There is a game, for example, inviting the players to take historical decisions, which once faced Russia's most prominent statesmen. Or the players will be offered to build the Kremlin from scratch.

The author of the majority of the website texts, including of those of the Democracy Lessons section, is the juvenile writer Grigory Oster. However, President Putin also contributed to the development of the site. There are three questionnaires where the president answers more than a hundred of questions. Vladimir Putin had more than once met the specialists involved in the project and examined all the texts, according to the Kremlin press office.

The website will be visited by an estimated of 10,000 people a day. The Kremlin forecasts that adults will make a lion's share of visitors in the beginning. "Less frequent visits will prompt us to update the website," said Kremlin officials.