Much attention has been paid to the delay in writing acquisition caused by irregularities of Russian orthography, but little is known about their effect on reading acquisition. Results of the present longitudinal reading acquisition study of Russian first graders suggest that phonological recoding is the dominant strategy in the initial phase of reading development in Russian, while there is evidence of gradual shift towards orthographic processing in reading high-frequency regular words. The study confirms that Russian readers encounter difficulties in reading orthographically complex words, where phonological recoding does not completely succeed. These findings are compared with results of reading acquisition studies in other orthographies, and their relevance for models of reading acquisition in different types of orthographies is discussed.