Getting the conversation started

Hi. This blog will hopefully be used to help with communication between students enrolled in courses at the University of Kansas (REES 110/111 Understanding Russia and Eastern Europe) and studets enrolled at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. While students enrolled in these courses have individual e-mail partners, this blog will be used for a more general forum. to get the conversation started, let me review for my Russian colleagues what we have covered thus far in the REES 110 class.

We started by looking at the general history of the country, talking about such famous persons as Vladimir, Ivan Grozny, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas I, Alexander II and Nicholas II. We have looked at the geography of the country and have traced its expansion from the 10th-20th centuries. We have briefly looked at the Orthodox religion, Russian art and some of its literature (we've read some of the Domostroi, Radischev's "St. Petersburg to Moscow," The Bronze Horseman, The Overcoat and some short stories by Pushkin, Tolstoy and Turgenev. We are just now approaching the traumatic events of 1917 and will cover the Russian Revolution next week.

To begin class, I usually select a couple photos and stories from the current news of the region and try to place these events into some sort of historical context. For instance, today, I included the picture of D. Medvedev and spoke about how Russians have often associated their ruler with strength (sometimes at the expense of the law). How do Russian students see this picture?