Russian is a Slavic language, of the IndoEuropean family, and has great world influence because of the once-powerful USSR.  From Wikipedia : "it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million ...speakers.... Russian is the eighth most-spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the seventh by total number of speakers."    

Although SLCC’s databases offer few articles for undergraduate students of Russian, they do provide information about a great variety of topics relating to Russian culture, which is an important part of learning the language.