Russian is an Eastern Slavonic language closely related to Ukrainian and Belarusian with about 200 million speakers in Russia and many other countries including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan.

Until the 17th century, the only written language in Russia was (Old) Church Slavonic. Russian started appearing in writing during the reign of Peter the Great (1672-1725) who introduced a revised alphabet and encouraged authors to use a literary style closer to their spoken language. The dialect of Moscow was used as the basis for written Russian.

Russian literature started to flower during the 19th century when Tolstoy, Dostoyevskii, Gogol, Blok and Pushkin were active. During the Soviet era knowledge of the Russian language was wide spread though the subjects authors could write about were restricted.

Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia are areas of major economic expansion, so there is a high demand for translation to and from Russian.