And to further reinforce or clarify my words, there is no agreement as to what actually constitutes a dialect much less a langauge. We've spawned so many subcategories off these two ill-defined categories that the entire process of categorizing language variation is very unsystematic.

In fact, a prominent linguist, formerly of Berkeley, named John McWhorter maintains that ALL languages are ultimately dialects containing groupings of sub-dialects which are in constant flux.

Russian ITSELF is a dialect, no less than Bulgarian or any of the others comprising the branches underlying PROTO-SLAVONIC. According to some, Belorusian and Ukranian, comprising the eastern Slavonic branch, are old dialects of Russian with their own literary tradition. The fact is, you're not going to find a natural language in the world that doesn't have dialects (or that isn't itself a dialect) and you're not going to find a language that's static unless it's dead.

It's quite conceivable that "Russian," as Olya clings to it, won't even exist in 500 years except possibly in name. The same goes for English and every other extant tongue.