The James Sweigert Years 1991-2003

In 1982, Timothy O’Connor joined the University of Northern Iowa faculty to teach Russian history.  When Constantine (“Deno”) Curris became the university’s seventh President in 1983, he brought with him a keen interest in Russia (then the Soviet Union).  Across the next few years, Curris and O’Connor paid close attention to the changing United States-Soviet relationship, particularly with Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival as Soviet General Secretary in 1985 and the evolution of his policies of glasnost (“openness” and transparency”)  and perestroika (“reconstruction” of Soviet life).

“I emphasized to Deno that the core of any area studies program is language, and that therefore the University ought to prioritize the development of Russian language learning,” O’Connor recalls.  “To his credit, Deno listened carefully and agreed to implement my recommendations.”

In 1987, UNI hired Sonia Yetter to teach Russian in the Modern Languages Department.  This soon led to talks with the UNI College of Education with the goal of enlarging the language program at the Laboratory School to include instruction in Russian.

The new Lab School Russian program had just begun in August 1991 when, four months later, the Soviet Union fell, opening up new possibilities for U.S. and Russian interaction.  James Sweigert had been hired to launch a two-year Russian language program at the Lab School with the assistance of Natalia Porfirenko as a resource.  Porfirenko, along with approximately 100 other teachers that year from the former Soviet Union, came to various U.S. schools and universities on the American Councils of International Education’s Teacher Exchange Program, funded by the U.S. Department of State.  (In subsequent years, until 1999, other teachers from Russia—namely from St. Petersburg and Tyumen’—would also come to the Lab School on this program to assist Sweigert in the classroom.)  Eight Lab School high school students signed up for the first Russian class that fall.  

“It’s somewhat rare to have Russian offered in Iowa high schools, and it’s still not all that common in the U.S.,” Sweigert explained at the time.  In fact, fewer than 10 Iowa high schools offered the language in 1991.  

James Becker, chair of the Lab School Foreign Language Department, revealed that Sweigert and the Lab School would be creating many of their instructional materials, for few textbooks existed for English-speaking learners.  “It’s really our hope to develop materials people can use,” Becker said.

Russian K-12 teachers were equally scarce.  Becker acknowledged that Sweigert didn’t quite meet the three to five years of teaching experience the Lab School usually sought in its hires.  However, Sweigert had earned a Master’s Degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1990 from the University of Southern California.  There he had taught university Russian classes for several years for levels I and II, and he had served as a judge of the high school State of California Olympiada of Spoken Russian.  In truth, Sweigert spoke three languages beyond English—Russian, Hungarian, and French—and had done graduate study in Leningrad in 1988.

The Program

“I was impressed that I could be involved with a new program from its beginning,” Sweigert recalls.   At the start, he taught the Russian I high school course and a six-week course in Russian for seventh- and eighth-grade students in the “Language Exploratory” course each semester where students took six weeks each of Russian, French, and Spanish.  This helped them decide which language or languages to continue in high school.  

For his first five years at the Lab School, while he was building his four-year, four-level Russian Program, Sweigert also taught one university-level Russian language class each semester for UNI’s Department of Modern Languages.  At the Lab School, his language classes were culturally-based, particularly at the eighth-grade level.  The students learned about Russian customs and food, and about changes occurring in Russia—as well as the Russian alphabet and language.

“It was a multi-cultural education—learning to see the sameness, but also respecting the differences,” he explained.

In May 1992, at the end of his first year, Sweigert joined with Lab School French teachers James Becker and Lowell Hoeft and Spanish teachers Rosa-Maria Findlay and Argelia Hawley in hosting the popular statewide secondary Foreign Language Festival. 

 “The world is getting smaller,” Sweigert noted.  “Everyone must have a foreign language, if not more than one.”  

Sweigert’s noteworthy creation of student and teacher exchanges and his both sensitive and highly successful involvement of Lab School students in state, national, and international Russian language competitions can be found by clicking these links:

Travel and Exchanges

Russian Language Competitions & Awards

Professional Growth & Outreach

During his second year, 1992-1993, Irina Sedykh, a high school teacher from St. Petersburg, Russia, arrived to team-teach with Sweigert—something different from a faculty exchange.  “It was a ground-breaking type of experience—having a professional in the field from Russia in front of the students every day,” Sweigert said.  This would lead to a later student exchange with St. Petersburg.  

In the summer of 1992 Sweigert was the resident director and academic coordinator for the American Councils Russian Language Area Studies Program (RLASP) at Herzen Pedagogical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia.  This was a program for undergraduate and graduate students from various colleges and universities from around the U.S.  (Herzen was where Sweigert himself studied in the fall of 1988.) 

The following year he earned a Fulbright-Hays grant for summer study at Moscow State University, a program for which he was also the resident director and academic coordinator.  In the summer of 1994, he offered a two-week intensive Russian language course at Price Lab School for middle school and high school students, with a few adults allowed to join as well.  He also began that year what would become popular one-week Elderhostel classes (for adults 55 years or older) on Russian history and culture.

Sweigert also shared his work with other teachers.  Beyond his Welcome to the USA booklet for visiting Russian students, Sweigert co-authored with John L. Watzke in 1997 The Russian Reference Grammar: Core Grammar in Functional Context, a complete supplementary aid to the study of Russian for beginners to advanced students.  The book’s reviewer in the 1999 Slavic and East European Journal found much to praise:

“[T]he presentation of grammar reflects the intention-grammar-speech model to which I personally subscribe; it affords a broad range of choices to both the student and teacher.  This model permits variance of the course and pace to fit the aims of instruction. . . . The versatility of the authors’ approach is graphically reflected in the table of contents: grammatical categories are adduced at the beginning, while related functions are presented in the right-hand column. . . Word-building suffixes are among the most popular means of word formation in Slavic languages.  Student mastery of the system of Russian word formation is critical in mastering the language as a whole.  Therefore the book’s authors deserve high praise for the section on word formation as well as for descriptions of several word-formation types.”

Because of Sweigert's involvement in Russo-American exchange programs managed by the American Councils for International Education (ACIE), in 2003 the ACIE hired him away from the Lab School to be their Program Manager of all U.S. Department of State-funded international exchange and education programs involving secondary-level students.  

Russian Speaking Countries

There are many Russian-speaking people all around the world, but there are just four countries where Russian is an official language: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia.  In two more countries Russian is used for official functions. In Tajikistan it is used in lawmaking and it is also the language of inter-ethnic communication. In Uzbekistan, Russian is used in registry offices and notary institutions across the nation. In the country of Turkmenistan, Russian is widely spoken as either a first or second language. It is typically spoken within the country’s major cities, and it is taught in schools.

Throughout non-sovereign and semi-autonomous regions within Russia itself, Russian is recognized as a de jure official language, which is spoken with other languages. In Russia, these regions include: Adygea, Altai Republic, Bashkiria, Buryatia, Chechnya, Chuvashia, Dagestan, Ingueshtia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Karachay-Cherkessia, Karelia, Khakassia, Komi Republic, Mari El, Mordovia, North Ossetia-Alania, Sakha Republic, Tatarstan, Tuva, and Udmurtia.

Russian is an important language in other former Soviet countries. In Ukraine, Russian is recognized as a de jure official language in the following regions: Donetsk Oblast, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, Kherson Oblast, Luhansk Oblast, Mykolaiv Oblast, Sevastopol, and Zaporizhia Oblast.  Russian is also the principal language in Moldova’s Transnistria region.  Russian is also widely spoken in former Soviet countries such as the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia).  (In fact, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many Russians have left their country and have emigrated to other former Soviet countries, mainly Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Georgia.)

It should be noted that the use of Russian can be a point of contention for people who are not ethnic Russians and who live in the former Soviet republics.  This is particularly the case in the Baltic countries, where some government policies in the post-Soviet era have attempted to limit the use of Russian in government, business, and education, and where native Russian speakers must use the local language (Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian) in order to have any opportunity for career advancement.  To the Baltic countries’ credit, though, much effort (and government funding) has been provided to help native Russian speakers attend classes to learn those local languages. This is particularly the case in Estonia and Latvia, where ethnic Russians make up 24% and 25% of those countries’ populations, respectively.  (In Lithuania, ethnic Russians make up only about 5% of that country’s population.)  

Noteworthy as well is the fact that the Russophone population in the Baltics is higher than the population of ethnic Russians, as many Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews who live in the Baltics use Russian as their first or primary language.  In all of the Baltic states, the ethnic Russian and Russophone population tends to be concentrated in the larger cities and towns; in the case of Estonia and Latvia, the ethnic Russian population is also concentrated in those areas on the border with Russia, as ethnic Russians have long lived in those regions (beginning in the early Middle Ages).

The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that there were suddenly 15 separate countries.  To varying degrees, many ethnic Russians in the former Soviet republics ended up moving to Russia proper, or even to other former Soviet republics where the use of Russian was encouraged and accepted.  Additionally in the case of the Baltics, a big change occurred when those countries entered the European Union in 2004.  Especially in the case of Estonia and Latvia, many ethnic Russians could hold EU passports.  While some stayed in the Baltics, many others went west to the United Kingdom and Ireland where new labor laws allowed those immigrants quickly to find relatively high-paying jobs.

There are a number of other countries where emigration from the former Soviet republics has meant an influx of Russian-language speakers.  In Europe, these countries include the aforementioned United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as France, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic and Poland.  

Outside of Europe a large number of Russian speakers live mainly in English-speaking countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.  In Asia, many Russians live in China’s northeastern areas, especially near the border with the Russian Federation. Finally, there are many Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel.  This phenomenon started in the late 1970s when the Soviet Union began allowing Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel, and has been continuing ever since.  In fact, of all countries that Russian speakers head to, they’ve left the largest and most lasting impact on the culture and politics of Israel.

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