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| | Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet and pronunciation |
 | | Russian is an Eastern Slavonic language closely related to Ukrainian and Belarusian with about 277 million speakers in Russia and 30 other countries including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova. |
 | | Russian started appearing in writing regularly 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. |
 | | Russian literature started to flower during the 19th century when Tolstoi, Dostoyevskii, Gogol, Blok and Pushkin were active. |
| www.omniglot.com /writing/russian.htm (526 words) |
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