The book gives a picture of the state of Russian dialects today, however, in cases where this is required to explain the dialect phenomena of our time, the authors rely on data from the history of the Russian language. When creating the manual, the data of the new dialectological literature were taken into account, lists of which are attached at the end of each chapter or section, as well as materials obtained in field expeditionary studies conducted by the Leningrad State University team in 1940-1960.