An Indiana university reports that students are returning to Russian language studies.
Russian, a popular subject during the Cold War era, fell out of favor with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Zinaida Breschinsky, who has been teaching Russian at Purdue University for 30 years, said the number of students dropped to a historical low after Boris Yeltsin became president.
But Breschinsky says that numbers have been going up for eight years. She believes that students see learning Russian as a good career move because the country is the world's largest in area and stocked with oil and other natural resources and says that many of the current crop are majoring in engineering or aeronautics.
Students tend to respond to what is going on in the world, she said, with Arabic gaining ground since the terrorist attacks of 2001 and Spanish increasingly popular because of the influx of immigrants in the United States.
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