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Nicholas J. Brown, Routledge, 1996, 440 pages
If you want to check the progress of your russian vocabulary versus the real-life frequency of russian words, buy this Russian word frequency dictionary .

The author used a corpus of russian texts to calculate the 10,000 most common words in contemporary Russian. The list begins with the most frequent word in the list и (and) and goes to #10,000 яростый (furious).

It's great fun to read and see which words are more common. For example, October is much more common than any other month in Russian. No suprise there! I find it fascinating to be able to contemplate on paper the distance I still have to travel to reach a specific level of fluency (grammar notwithstanding).

To judge your progress in learning new russian words, just open the dictionary at a page, for example between 1500 and 1600. Count every word that you understand. Then you reach some conclusions about your level, such as I know 90% of the 1500 most common Russian words or I understand 50% of the Russian words that are between the 4000 and 5000 thousand most common. This is of course an approximation and even by increasing the size of the sample you will not get an airtight statistic. But it still gives you a good idea of where your stand in your Russian vocabulary learning. It is a great book to have as a yardstick to measure your progress in acquiring russian vocabulary.

The higher the frequency rank (meaning less frequent words), the lesser the percentage of words you'll know. I was still encouraged to see that even in the rarefied atmosphere of the 9000 to 9100 most common Russian words (they are not so common up there!), I could still understand a few.

When you are dispaired that you will never get to speak Russian fluently, it's good to have a book that materializes all the words you can learn to achieve a certain landmark. 10,000 is already tall order, so most learners will probably focus first on 1500, then 3000, then 5000 and perhaps one day get over 10,000.

I know some people use this book as a discovery tool for useful words they have not yet encountered. Personally, I don't think you should make it an absolute priority to learn every single word below a certain frequency count.

In any case this is a great book for the Russian learner and I warmly recommend it!