Quote Originally Posted by Forrest
Someone has posted the complete text, and the audio, for the US State Department's FAST course in Russian at the following link: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=5...78672f26f53457

It's for people being assigned to diplomatic facilities in Russia, and includes various (presumably no longer up-to-date) hints re living there, etc. It's a "short course" intended to provide basic conversational skiils rather than a comprehensive grammar-based course, but some may still find it useful.
The State department (FSI) page for this is public, as are several short course for other languages. Just look here:

http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content ... ge=Russian

The way to do this for self-study would be to open the text in one tab or window and open the audio in another window. Then just stop the audio when you need to. The material is really organized quite well, at least for the first 5 lessons I looked over today. Since the audio and text go together so nicely, I would say this is one of the best beginner self-study programs I've seen yet, and I've looked at lots of them. Obviously it won't hurt to supplement it with other materials as well.