As the textbook’s authors claim, their “approach is … rooted in data on the learning preferences of today’s students” (xii). Indeed, this beautifully designed textbook addresses popular contemporary topics like disability, gender equality, romance, the environment, religion, dissimilarities between cultures, and identity in Russian-speaking space. Topic discussions are informed by contemporary films or TV series suggested by each of eleven units, which include texts and audio and video materials from a first-person perspective, as the authors underline, a point of view quite appealing to today’s student body.

Each unit of Pro-dvizhenie has the following: a warm-up, which includes reading or translation and discussion of posters, memes, and texts; vocabulary, which offers wide-ranging lexis with set phrases relevant to a specific theme and devotes significant attention to colloquial language, even presenting exercises tasking students to use slang; a review of grammar, like participles, adverbial participles, or word formation; “to the text,” which includes texts on different themes related to the unit topic; reading and discussion of the texts to prepare students to watch films and TV series; and a group project, which proposes activities related to films, the internet, and the unit topics (writing about film is an important part of the textbook, which provides students with directions on how to write an essay and avoid mistakes). All units conclude with a review of covered material and appendices that have transcripts of included audio. The textbook contains an array of exercises that give instructors options, for there is no need to cover all the material, and instructors can pick which of the eleven units to cover and in what order. The same applies to the texts, discussions, and films. All of this constitutes the textbook’s strengths.

At the same time, as always happens with textbooks, there are imperfections. Here, inaccuracies appear concerning linguistic information, literary and cinematic terminology, and, most significantly, lexical errors. For example: compound sentences consist of dependent clauses (181), the authors contend, whereas, in fact, complex sentences, not compound sentences, have dependent clauses. Adverbial participles agree with the subject, it is stated, yet adverbial participles grammatically cannot agree with the subject; rather, they indicate the action produced by the subject (69). Kinematograf [cinema] and kinokritika [film criticism] are not respectively “filmmaking” and “film critic” (3–4). The Russian esse [essay] (60, 79, 109) is a literary genre, not a student composition. There is no such thing as dragotsennye iskopaemye, there are “dragotsennye metally” [precious metals] (166). Vezde odni i te zhe derevˊia should be “takie zhe derevia” [the same kinds of trees] (166). There is also eyebrow-raising use of “russkii” (59) instead of “rossiiskii”: glavnye russkie filˊmy (36), russkie i sovetskie realii (57), and so on.

Some texts are based on specific sources, but others are not cited, and it is unclear what is the foundation for some statements, conclusions, and data (72–73, 97–98, 198–200). Though the text Chto znachit bytˊ pravoslavnym? [What does it mean to be an Orthodox Christian?] references a source (145–147), some assertions, such as the one stating that Chekhov openly expressed his orthodoxy and supported the Russian Orthodox Church are neither well known nor supported, and therefore seem ill-advised. The phrase predstaviteli iudaizma (147) and the sentence Na territorii Izrailia okolo milliona iudeev, kotorye imeiut russkie korni (147) are, at the very least, questionable, because the former combination does not exist: iudei means “a follower of Judaism,” russkie korni implies Russian by blood—perhaps the authors mean Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union.

The book was released in 2022, the year of the full-blown Russian invasion of Ukraine, but even before then, use of Vladimir Putin’s vocabulary or quotations by him and other high-ranking Kremlin officials (Sergei Shoigu on the invention of combat robots, 122) would have been deemed insensitive. The word skrepa [bond] (213, 219) was used by Putin in 2012, implying “traditional Russian values” and Russian national identity, and the quotation that Russian national diversity is “our beauty and strength” (175) reads as quite nationalistic. The descriptive goal of the film K sosediam s liubovˊiu [To Neighbors with Love]—“to show strong ties between all nationalities [peoples] of the former USSR to strengthen them in the minds of the younger generation” (178)—reads like Soviet propaganda and should not be presented as a realistic interpretation of history. It is not as though textbooks cannot cover these things. But they should be properly and precisely contextualized, otherwise they do not serve the stated purposes.

The authors were guided by noble goals. However, in the present time—even if we ignore the Russo-Ukrainian War, which we cannot—the imperfections stated above stand out. Nevertheless, Pro-dvizhenie has much to offer. If the next edition could shed the shortcomings, it may certainly be a desirable textbook for educators.