The dissemination of the Russian language in the world has taken place over the centuries, leading to the appearance of both permanent and ephemeral varieties of Russian speech affected by language con­tact and language mixing. In today’s situation, regional varieties of non-standard Russian are mainly studied from a sociolinguistic point of view, but ethnographic, psycholinguistic, and discourse analytic methods are used as well. The present collection of articles is an attempt to uncover the mechanisms of language contact in its historical and synchronic aspects, in Russia, the CIS, and ‘the far abroad’.