This year's Orthodox icon painting contest is dedicated to the 350th anniversary of Peter the Great. Also, for the first time this year, paintings by convicts could be submitted to the competition. In Karelia, the winner of the regional stage depicted the evening St. Petersburg and supplemented the originally designed frame with a wooden model of the sculpture "The Bronze Horseman"
The composition of the competition commission included the chairman of the prison ministry department, priest Mikhail Kuzemka, and employees of the educational department of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in the Moscow region. The members of the commission took into account the correspondence of the submitted works to the theme of the competition, the method and technique of painting icons.