Russian Resources

Jump to:  Finding Russian Websites  Russian News  Dictionaries & Language  Inputting Russian on Computers

Finding Russian Websites

National Level

• Google Yes, Google! Enter your search terms in Windows Cyrillic or Unicode. If you go to www.google.com.ru, you also have the option of searching only the Russian domain – .ru.
• Benjamin Sher’s (enormous) Russian index
• Friends & Partners - Big US-Russia internet portal with many resources.
• Rambler - a big entry portal with search engine

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Russian News

News in English

Either of the following excellent sites, which draw heavily upon Russian news sources, can be subscribed to as an email newletter.

• RFERL Newsline
• Johnson’s Russia List

News in Russian

• SMI.ru This excellent new mass media site provides 1) direct access to a vast array of sources (see the “catalog,” bottom left) and 2) indexed current news items with links to relevant articles on various major media sites.
• Here you will find a r emarkable collection of online Russian news sites, and particularly regional news sources. Address line in browser does not change, however, so references to located items cannot be easily sent or kept.
• Izvestia - Online version of the newspaper
• Lenta - Online news source
• NTV - Internet news site for the television station
• Nezavisimaia gazeta
• ITAR-TASS – the wire service
• Moskovskii komsomolets – popular, local Moscow daily with attitude
• Kommersant - Major national newspaper
• Komsomol’skaia pravda – popular, sensationalistic newspaper
• Radio Liberty in Russian
• BBC World Service in Russian
• The magazine Ogonyok
• Argumenty i fakty – popular weekly
• Literaturnaia Gazeta

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Dictionaries & Language

Russian-English, English-Russian

At any good bookstore, one should be able to pick up one of the best two all-around Russian-English, English-Russian dictionaries: Kenneth Katzner’s dictionary and the Oxford dictionary. Neither is available on line.

• Here, the best online English-Russian/Russian-English resource, an abridged version of ABBYY Lingvo. It includes ABBYY’s universal, economics, science and computer dictionaries and thesaurus. (Full software includes polytechnic, oil & gas, medical and law dictionaries, grammatical information and hyperlink functionality from Windows applications.) ABBYY also makes excellent multilingual OCR software – Finereader.
• 23rd edition of Muller’s English-Russian dictionary.   Check off Англо-русский словарь Мюллера and use search.
• Multitran, a huge online dictionary, or rather compilation of dictionaries, encompassing general, as well as technical and scientific terminology. Seems that quality lags in comparison with Lingvo above, however.

Russian websites with all-Russian dictionaries and encyclopedias

• Here To search Ozhegov’s Russian dictionary, Zalizniak’s grammatical dictionary or Fasmer’s 4-volume etymological dictionary (separately or simultaneously) in several different encodings. Interface is complicated, but bonus is automatic linkage of word’s looked up in Zalizniak’s dictionary to a very large and detailed Soviet-era English-Russian, Russian-English dictionary. Better interface for searching the updated version of Ozhegov (Ozhegov and Shvedova) over here.
• Here – The second edition of Vladimir Dal’s famous, groundbreaking mid-nineteenth century dictionary, packed with interesting cultural material, sayings and idioms, dialectical variants, etc. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective, this searchable (use the intial letters search, as the dictionary is arranged by root words) and indexed web-version is updated to modern spelling.
• This site will allow you to search Ushakov’s excellent four-volume dictionary from the 1930’s (possibly the best Russian explanatory dictionary and the dictionary from which Ozhegov’s popular dictionary was derived), as well as a number of other dictionaries and encyclopedias. (Unfortunately, often accesses slowly over a modem connection)
• Gramota -- hub site for linguistics, grammar, stylistics, etc. Simultaneously search orthographical dictionary, dictionary of difficulties, explanatory dictionary, dictionaries of stress for both common and proper nouns, dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, Russian names, and language teaching terminology. Also includes online dictionary of Russian argo.
• At the bottom of Gramota's dictionary page, there are links to many, many more online dictionaries (monolingual, multilingual, specialized) and encyclopedias.
• Russian Academy of Sciences Another compendium of simultaneously searchable online dictionaries (incldes dictionaries of Pushkin and Dostoevsky’s language) and online grammar
• Krugosvet -- good online Russian encyclopedia with simple interface.
• Here -- What appears to be still a woefully-far-from-full on-line version of Brokgauz and Efron’s exhaustive (86-volume) turn-of-the-century encyclopedia (something like a vintage Britannica) (The entire encyclopedia could be purchased on 4 CD’s this past year in Moscow.) Make sure that you click the поиск button to search the encyclopedia (rather than ozon.ru -- ’s largest online bookstore).

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Inputting Russian on Computers

• The AATSEEL russification site appears to give the most straightforward instructions. If you are a student and using Windows, in addition to activitating Windows’ own Cyrillic support, you will want to add a homophonic keyboard, which can be found here.
• Paul Gorodetsky’s Russification for Windows site
• Russification for Macintosh on Friends & Partners

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