I think that if I really wanted to learn Russian, I'd get a language program and use it for maybe a month, to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and to practice pronunciation, then I'd see if I could find a Russian speaker (my guess is that Moscow is the standard pronunciation, just as Omaha is closest to American Broadcast English). A Uruguayan friend of mine came to Miami knowing nothing about English, and advertised in the newspaper "FREE SPANISH LESSONS". then he and several English speakers practiced each other's language on one another. This cost him nothing. There are more Russian speakers who want to learn English in the US than vice versa, and a lot of them are highly educated people. I'd find four or five people of different ages and genders.
Every two or three years they update every language program. This means that when they come out with Rossetta Stone Russian 2009, the 2007 version will go on sale. Or at least that is the way it works with Spanish DVD programs.
I have heard that Rosetta Stone is pretty good, especially for vocabulary acquisition. I have not examined any Russian programs, so I'd check the reviews on Amazon.com, and see what I could buy on craigslist.org.
There are two activities to learning a language (1) learn the words and how to pronounce them and spell them, and (2) how to put them into sentences so they make sense.
Russian is a pretty complicated language compared to English. It has a lot of phonemes (sounds) that English lacks as well as combinations of sounds that do not occur in English. It is fortunately spelled almost phonetically. Lower case letters are identical to upper case letters, just smaller, not like Aa Bb Dd Qq in English, but I think there are 40 letters in all. Cursive writing is a bitch to read until you get used to it. Strangely, there is no present tense of the verb "to be", so "I am Russian" comes out 'I Russian".
The tonal aspect of the language is different from English, but it's not a tonal language like Chinese, where the same syllable can mean six things, depending on rising, falling and other types of tones.
Grammatically, there are more verb tenses, and the nouns are declined (nominative, declarative , accusative, vocative, illiative cases, etc. There are more than there are in German, anyway.
Check the Internet for free Russian websites, by all means. Get as much practice as you can, and always practice orally.
The Soviet Far East has a very interesting history.
Good luck.