I'm going to go. He's a sures, yes,

a ras, it yes shawras.

We're hush a hush. Welcome to the first anniversary edition of the Russian rulers

podcast part one and I'm your host, Mark Schaus.

When I first started this podcast, I thought I knew something about Russian history. I mean, I had taken a year of it in college, and I'd read a number of works over the course of the past 30 years of my life.

What I discovered early on is how little I really knew and how much richer Russia's history is than I ever dreamed of.

I thank all of you for listening to me to go on about something I so enjoy during my

downtime for my real world job. Your comments and

suggestions over the past year have pushed me on when I thought I was

going to make this just a monthly event. The number of subscribers to the podcast is another one of

those things that has truly blown me away. If you had told me that one year after

starting I would have over 68,000 subscribers and would have had over a quarter

million downloads of my episodes, I would have told you that you are nuts.

But here we are, one year later, and both those things came true. Thanks to all of you.

Now onto a multi-part review of the Russian rulers podcast.

This is going to be something where it's going to

be in addition to the regular episodes that you'll be listening. So we'll be getting about

two or three episodes a week now until we get this all done. I'm going to do it in bits and parts.

It's not going to be totally smooth, the transition from one ruler to another, but I just

want to give you a basic overview of what we've listened to since we started this

podcast on April 30th of 2010. So here we go. Back in episode one we recounted the early days of the scattered peoples we were to call the Russe.

These Slavic peoples were first invaded by the Scythians, then the Sarmatians, from Persia, followed by the Goths, the Huns, Bulgars, the Cruel Avars, and the Khazars.

...