Penza, 3 December 2016. PenzaNews. Penza will be seen as a provincial city until residents, who consider their small motherland to be periphery, change their mind. Such opinion was expressed by the famous publicist and repeated winner of intellectual shows Anatoly Vasserman.

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“It is quite difficult to form an impression about the city seeing it only from a car window, but the people, to whom I talked here, did not appear as provincials,” he said at the online-conference, which was held within the 2nd Intellectual Tournament of Business Magazine.

According to Anatoly Vasserman, he does not agree with the words of Vasily Klyuchevsky that the centre of Russia is located at the periphery.

“On the contrary, it is easy to feel the centre of Russia. Almost all places that I visited have the great feeling of unity being connected to the centre, and I cannot say that the periphery is opposed to the centre, but it differs from it psychologically,” he said.

According to the publicist, one of the most vivid features of provinciality is that local population thinks of whether their city is seen as periphery.

“In my opinion, it is a great psychological disadvantage. Until you see yourself as something peripheral and secondary, you will not be treated seriously and given any serious tasks,” Anatoly Vasserman explained.

He added that it is useless to think of the question “Are we the centre or periphery?”

“You should look for more complicated tasks, then you will be treated if not as the centre of the universe, but, at least, as the centre of some real work,” Anatoly Vasserman emphasized.