Putin making historic visit to Komi-Perm district

Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to spend Friday in Perm, from where he will travel by helicopter to Kudymkar, the capital of the Komi-Perm Autonomous District. The president is expected to hold a working session with the regional leadership about unification of the two entities. Putin is also to meet with local intelligentsia. He is to return to Perm toward evening for a meeting on creating a center for engine building.

Putin will be the first Russian head of state in 100 years to visit the Komi-Perm Autonomous District. The district, which is served neither by railroads or airlines, has never been visited by a general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or by the last president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, or by the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin.