SOCIETY 371 / 2017

RUSSLAND
INTERVIEW
The Great Bolgar
museum preserve
Tatarstan – see and try
everything yourself!
SOCIETY met with Sergey Ivanov, Chairman of
the State Committee on Tourism of the Republic of
Tatarstan and spoke about the Republic as a relatively
new, highly frequented tourist destination.
CURRICULUM
VITAE
Sergey Ivanov was born
in 1976 in Severodvinsk,
USSR. Currently he works
as the Chairman of the
State Committee on Tourism
of the Republic of Tatarstan.
In 2009 he started
to work as the CEO of the
“Tourist information center
of Kazan city”. Afterwards
he was Chairman of the
Committee for External
Relations and Tourism
under the Executive
Committee of the Kazan
Municipality, Municipal
Institution. From 2009 to
2010 he was Chairman of
the Committee for External
Relations and Tourism in
the Kazan Executive Committee
Administration. In
2014 he got the position of
the Deputy Minister of The
Ministry of Youth Affairs,
Sport and Tourism of the
Republic of Tatarstan.
For seven years you have been holding
the professional position of the
Chairman of the State Committee on
Tourism of the Republic of Tatarstan.
What are the recent achievements?
The Republic of Tatarstan is one of
the leading regions of the Russian Federation in
tourism. The number of tourists increases each
year by 13,5 percent on average. Compared to 2015,
the quantity of foreign tourists coming to the Republic
of Tatarstan, has grown by 6,7 percent and
reached 250.506 people in 2016. In the last seven
years we have also established strong links to Germany,
Finland, China, Iran and UAE. Thanks to
the activities of the State Committee for Tourism,
we have opened different foreign tourism markets
for the Republic, participating in nine international
fairs in 2016. We also took part in several
online-fairs, road-shows for tourism companies
and representatives of mass media in Russian cities
and foreign countries. During these years we
developed a strong tourism infrastructure: 404 hotels
and other accommodation facilities are available
in the Republic; different associations for a
stable activity of the entrepreneurs in the tourism
sphere have been established: an “Association of
the hotels of Kazan and the Republic of Tatarstan”,
an “Association of the restaurants of the Republic
of Tatarstan”, an “Association of the hostels of the
Republic of Tatarstan”, and an “Association of the
travel agencies of the Republic of Tatarstan”. The
goal was to create the image of Kazan city as a
third capital of the Russian Federation and to create
a complex image of the Republic of Tatarstan
as a tourism destination, as a weekend destination
for Russian tourists and a region of cultural and
intellectual tourism for foreign tourists. We’ve already
achieved the goal to create an image of the
Republic as a region of different colors: Kazan as
a capital of the region with concentration of culture,
gastronomy and history; the “Island town of
Sviyazhsk” is that same fairy-tale island of Buyan,
that magical land, which Pushkin wrote about in
his story of “Prince Gvidon”; “The Great Bolgar”,
the site of the ancient settlement of Bolgar, registered
by UNESCO and renowned for its history and
legends, attracts yearly hundreds of thousands of
tourists from all over the world.
Fotos: State Committee on tourism of the Republic of Tatarstan
44 | SOCIETY 1_2017