Students and faculty from Texas Wesleyan's history and music programs spent 10 days traveling in Russia from May 18–29. The group was led by music professor John Fisher, Ph.D., and history professor Chris Ohan, Ph.D.

The trip included five days in Moscow where participants toured the Kremlin, Red Square and saw the still-preserved body of V. I. Lenin. They traveled around the city by means of the Moscow Metro and visited museums, such as the Tretyakov Gallery. The group heard Rimsky-Korsakov's opera "A Bride for the Tsar" in the same Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory where Fort Worth's Van Cliburn (1934-2013) won the first international Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958. Several in the group experienced a visit to the Russian banya and its regime of alternating hot steam and icy cold pools. After a day trip to the spiritual center of the Russian Orthodox Church, the monastery of Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the group traveled via sleeper train to St. Peterburg for another five days.

In Russia's "Venice of the North," the group visited the Peter and Paul Fortress and saw the former Winter Palace, now the State Hermitage Museum as well as Russia's version of Versailles, the Peterhof Palace. On a day-trip to Pushkin, students toured the Catherine Palace with its famous Amber Room and saw the Alexander Palace, last official residence of Tsar Nicholas II and his family before they were moved and eventually killed by the Bolsheviks following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The group also visited the sumptuous Yusupov Palace, the location of the assassination of the Grigory Rasputin in 1916. In addition to palaces, participants visited the Monument of the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad and toured its museum commemorating the most traumatic episode in the city's history – Nazi Germany's 900-day Siege of Leningrad during World War II. Finally, the group saw a ballet performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Mariinsky Theatre on the eve of their return to Texas.‌

The trip was an optional component of several courses in music and history offered by Fisher and Ohan during the spring 2016 semester at Texas Wesleyan. At sites such as Novodevichy, where Russian leaders deposited unwanted wives, and the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, known as the "Church on the Spilled Blood" where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, music students gave oral presentations based on research conducted before the trip.  Additionally, history students recorded video at locations like the Moscow's St. Basil's Cathedral and the cabin of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg, from which they created mini-documentaries.