Acknowledgements

Funding
The RAILS project received a generous 3-year (2003-06) grant from the International Research and Studies Program, International Education Programs, Office of Postsecondary Education, U.S. Department of Education. We thank program officer Ed McDermott in particular for all of his help and support over the course of the grant project.

RAILS Advisory Board
Dr. Mark Beissinger, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. David Danaher, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Fran Hirsch, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Olga Kagan, University of California-Los Angeles
Dr. Frank Miller, Columbia University
Dr. Rebecca Oxford, University of Maryland
Mr. Paul Sandrock, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Dr. Elvira Swender, American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

Additional outside reviewers
Dr. Anne Gorsuch, University of British Columbia
Dr. Manon Van de Water, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Elena Nikolaevna Shchepina, Saint Petersburg State University
(Other UW-Madison faculty?)

We especially thank Olga Kagan for her careful review and editing of the RAILS lessons.

Special thanks
We wish to especially thank the following individuals, without whose contributions the RAILS project would not have been possible:

• Dr. Galina Aksenova, theater and film historian and critic and Associate Director of the Middlebury College Russian School, who conducted and filmed interviews with experts and prominent public figures in Russia and the U.S.
• Marina Goldovskaya, one of the world's most accomplished documentariens, who helped us to obtain permission to use excerpts her films Solovky Power and Children of Ivan Kuzmich in our project and shared her personal memories and experiences through two video-taped interviews and many personal conversations;
• Dr. Sergei Khruschev, Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, for sharing personal memories about his father Nikita Khrushchev, and for providing a unique perspective on his father's legacy.
• Dr. Alexander Prokhorov, Department of Modern Languages, College of William and Mary, who shared recollections of his grandfather, and his family's experiences after his grandfather was interviewed for the film Solovky Power.

Films
Use in the RAILS lessons of excerpts from the films Solovky Power and Children of Ivan Kuzmich is courtesy of Goldfilms:

Marina Goldovskaya, Director and Cinematographer
Mosfilm, Producer
Goldfilms, Distributor

Further information about Solovky Power and Children of Ivan Kuzmich can be obtained from Goldfilms:
Phone: 310-476-0167 Fax: 310-476-0267
Email: goldfilms@adelphia.net
Web: www.goldfilms.org

Interviews
We acknowledge and thank the many individuals who agreed to be interviewed for this project, and the many native speakers of Russian who have lent their voices to the audio recordings in the lessons.

Photos
In all RAILS lessons, all photographs without an attribution are stills taken from one of the video clips on which the lesson is based.

Students
We thank the students of Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who have tested these and previous versions of these materials and given us valuable suggestions and feedback.

University support
We thank the UW-Madison Slavic Department for providing an institutuional home for the project. We especially thank Slavic Department program adminstrator Jean Hennessey for all of her work on behalf of RAILS.

Finally, we extend our sincere gratitutde to the many talented programmers, graphic designers and media production specialists with UW-Madison Division of Information Technology Learning Solutions and Letters and Science Learning Support Services, and Xivic Communications, especially Bruno Browning, Ron Cramer, Michelle Glenetski, Doug Worsham, and Bahman Zakeri.

The RAILS lessons were created with the Multimedia Annotator and Multimedia LessonBuilder, authoring software developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Visit the online storefront for the UW-Madison College of Letters and Science Licensing Service to purchase the software.