Archives can be used only if you have some definite information to pinpoint the search, that is, names, dates and locations. This "anchor" data could be a combination of the place and date of birth, the name of the military regiment your ancestor served in, also with the year of his service, etc. Street addresses or village names could be a good beginning for looking through church records. The name of an office or factory, with the date of departure from this job, yields your ancestor’s file from personnel departments that keep such records almost indefinitely. 

Dates are of special importance. Without exact names, locations and dates no archive is going to help you. Postings on various on-line billboards remain a possibility, but the Russian net is still in a nascent state, and the number of people with the WWW access is too small to hope that such ads produce tangible results. Nevertheless, I know of several cases of BBS announcements that have actually ended in finding ancestors. The key factor of success was either a very rare surname or one belonging to a famous family. 

If you have the basic data ready, the best way for a foreigner would be to retain a reliable contact in Russia. Here is why: 

• Few people in Russia, including archive officials, speak or understand foreign languages. 
  
  

• All correspondence is done in Russian. 
  
  

• Several local phone calls may be also helpful. (Very few archives in Russia are on the net) 
  
  

• Russian archives, as well as other government offices here, tend to charge foreigners ten-fold or more the fees that they charge Russian citizens. A simple search in an archive could cost less than $20 for your Russian friend, but it might reach $200 or even $400, if a foreigner asks for that service directly. 
  
  

• Payment is made in Russian rubles only, by mail transfers or bank transfers to the archive’s banking account. It is impossible to do that from abroad. 
  
  

• A Russian contact could find a local archive official who might do some researching in his/her free time, for a personal fee. This arrangement greatly facilitates matters. The contact will be able to search in Russian libraries. 

Be prepared to wait. It takes an average Russian archive from one to five months to answer a genealogy request even after a front payment. Sometimes the search produces no results, but sometimes initial discoveries open new vistas for a more profound investigation. Archives vary in terms of hospitality. For example, Kirov, Arkhangelsk and Kazan welcome requests and fulfill them accurately, but Samara and Orenburg either turn down private requests or refuse to perform an additional search after the initial discovery of promising information. 

If you are searching deep in history, keep in mind that regional archives only keep records dating back to about 1790. Earlier information may be found in federal archives in Moscow or St. Petersburg. 

It helps a lot if the person you are researching had a job in the Soviet era and you know the location of that job. Every ministry, institution, factory, railroad, etc. maintains an archive of its own, which is available for the descendants. To find the personnel file of an ancestor (containing a mandatory handwritten autobiography and filled-in detailed questionnaire forms) you will have to know the year of his/her departure from this job. Each year, the files of dismissed personnel are archived in an alphabetical order.