Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book in Russia. It is also the most popular children's book in the world, but it is especially popular in Russia because the Bear in a popular animal in Russia. The Bear is even thought of as a Russian animal although there are plenty of bears in America too.

Russian is spoken by more than one hundred eighty million people. Russian is widely spoken in all of the former Soviet Republics, where it was a required language in the schools, including the Ukraine. After the break-up of the Soviet union, there has been a massive immigration of Russians into Western Europe and Israel. In the United States, the largest group of Russians is on Brighton Beach in Brooklyn.

This translation into Russian is part of project to translate Winnie-the-Pooh into other languages. The idea is children need to learn to read at an early age and the best way to teach them to read is to provide reading materials that they find interesting. Children around the world laugh when they see Winnie-the-Pooh saying and doing silly things. Since Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book world-wide, translating this book into the different languages of the world will be conducive to teaching children to read in those languages.

Boris Vladimirovich Zakhoder was a Russian poet and children's writer. He is best known for his translations of Winnie-the-Pooh, Mary Poppins, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and other children's classics. He was born September 9, 1918, in Cahul, Moldova. He translated several children's books into Russian but Winnie-the-Pooh was by far the most successful. He died November 7, 2000, in Moscow, Russia. It was in England in 1926 that A. A. Milne first published Winnie the Pooh. He continues to be a hero in Britain and the United States. That should hardly come as a surprise, but in just one year Milne's books sold more than 3.5 million copies in the Soviet Union, where he is known simply as ''Vinnie, '' or, more formally, ''Vinnie Pookh.''