A visual-first route into Russia in 1914 for students who learn best from imagery and spatial organisation.
Starter: read the empire as a map
Project a map of the Russian Empire in 1914. Before any text, ask students to annotate three things directly onto it: where industry clustered, where the population was densest, and how far the edges sat from Petrograd. The point lands visually — a centre giving orders to a periphery it can barely reach.
Consolidation: the four-forces wheel
Students draw a wheel split into four quadrants (political, economic, social, international) and fill each with icons rather than sentences — a crown for autocracy, a factory for industrialisation, and so on. This turns the abstract "conditions" into a single retrievable image.