This paper discusses inclusion of the Russian language in European language resource development. It is suggested that European initiatives to develop language resources can not afford to ignore Russian, and that there is much work to do to resolve differences in resources on the two sides of the former Iron Curtain. A 1995 project, undertaken by organizations in Russia, Germany, and Bulgaria, was designed to make use of the 10,000 vocabulary entries from a Russian dictionary in two machine translation systems dealing with syntactic information and to provide software to accelerate conversion of data into an appropriate computer format. The paper provides a brief outline of this project. Finally, the status and characteristics of current Russian archival material are described. (MSE)