YEREVAN, JUNE 26, NOYAN TAPAN. According to official data, 275 thousand Armenians lived in the Krasnodar territory in 2002, and according to unofficial data, their number was within the range of 400-600 thousand. As Tigran Tavadian, the Yerkramas newspaper editor informed at the June 25 press conference, newspapers are published, dancing groups, Sunday schools act in order to support preservation of Armenian identity in Armenian populated areas of the territory. He mentioned at the same time that the local Armenian communities are not well-organized and do not cooperate with each other. T. Tavadian considered the cooperation with the state structures of Armenia to be unproductive, as well. According to him, it is necessary that the RA Ministries of Diaspora and Culture work out a joint program to present the Armenian culture in the region. In his words, performers of the "rabis" music (town folklore) mainly come to the territory, and as a result, a low taste is built up especially among the youth. Besides, in his words, there are problems of getting text-books from the RA Ministry of Education and Science. T. Tavadian mentioned that Sunday schools of the region get those text-books by overcoming many difficulties, particularly, those connected with tax clearance. In T.Tavadian's opinion, the RA government can raise that issue before the RF government.

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