Since standard English lessons at my level are no longer interesting to me, we discuss various aspects of American history and culture. Besides expanding my horizons and understanding the context of the country, I manage to address the issue of non-IT related communication. This has always been difficult. For example, I only learned today that “tsar” in English is not “tcar”, but “zar”. I learned that the sentence I saw the man cross the street and the cat jump over the fence is grammatically correct, and cross and jump do not have to be crossing and jumping but can remain such infinitives (By the way, does anyone know what this rule is?).
But the most interesting thing is, of course, the history itself. I realized that I knew almost nothing about it. The roles of Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Kennedy, Reagan were totally unclear to me. And then it turns out that the country is proud of them, and many educated people can talk for hours about the mark they left on history.
And I asked myself – we also studied our native history at school. What rulers are we proud of and why? We seem to have one of the highest levels of education in the world: 56% of the population has completed college or university, compared to 35% in the US (at least a bachelor’s degree). I know, most likely every other person in my contacts is educated and remembers at least the basics of Russian history. Who are you proud of?
I tried to answer this question myself and essentially recalled two names. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Of course, does this reveal my poor knowledge of history? Or did the other characters just not impress in the textbooks under the “why they should be respected?” section. Or is it complicated? Or did we just parrot the textbook in school and not engage our brains?
Well, with Peter the Great it’s clear. He cut through the window to Europe, shaved beards with an axe, built the Northern Venice, and it seems he brought potatoes but didn’t succeed in fully introducing them.
I also remember about Catherine II the Crimea, reforms, and how she brought the Enlightenment to agrarian Russia, and along with Voltaire and Diderot cultivated culture. Probably I’ve forgotten a ton of other items. But okay, even just for this, she deserves respect – cheers, Katya, remembered and honored.
Not looking at Google, who else? Which of our tsars and princes would a typical Russian person recall fondly?
(In the next post, I’ll talk about an interesting story involving the Bolsheviks, Catherine the Great, and Mikoyan, the one associated with the meatpacking plant)
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 