Russian is the fourth most widely-spoken language in the world, being the first language of more than 220 million people, both in the Russian Federation and large immigrant communities in Israel, the USA, Canada, Germany and Australia. Russian is also spoken by most people in the former republics of the USSR, and understood throughout Eastern Europe, but you need some sensitivity in using Russian in these areas. Despite the distribution of Russian speakers, the standard variety used in this book is universally understood. Russian has slight regional differences, but these are not generally termed 'dialects' - the pronunciation of individual sounds or vocabulary differs only slightly, similar to variations in English across the USA. One reason for this uniformity is that 'standard' Russian is strictly enforced by the Russian education system - deviations from this standard are stigmatized, implying a lack of education and culture.
Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which is based on Greek. St Cyril and St Methodius, Greek missionaries in the ninth century, translated the Bible into the language now known as Old Church Slavonic, using a modified alphabet to represent non-Greek sounds. This early script developed into the alphabets used in many modern Slavic languages, including Russian. Before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the influence and power of Russian language and culture was widespread all over the former Soviet Union, and Russian Cyrillic was introduced to transcribe various non-Slavic and even non-Indo-European languages such as Mongolian and Kurdish.
You don't need to learn the Cyrillic alphabet to use this book, but it's not difficult, and it's very useful (especially for reading placenames). Some letters even look and sound the same as English (A, E, K, M, O, T). Also, most letters only have one or two possible pronunciations, which you can predict from context. The one trap is that some letters look like English but sound totally different - the letter H sounds like 'N', and P sounds like 'R'!
Russian is very closely related to Belarusian and Ukrainian (all being East Slavic lanuages) - and politics aside, a Russian and a Ukrainian can communicate quite well, each using their own language. In fact all the Slavic languages have more in common than, for example, the Germanic languages, and so Russian makes a convenient springboard for learning Czech or Polish.
As there's been limited contact between Russia and the west, and it's hard to find English speakers outside the major centers, your effort to speak the local language will often be greeted with surprise and interest. Fsevo kharosheva!
