Anton, Thanks for the appreciation of the Snowball work! The java implementation was done by Richard Boulton, so I'm hoping he, or one of the Russian users, will be able to supply the answer here. Certainly the sample vocab is in KOI8R. My guess is that it would work if you didn't bother to specify "KOI8_R" in FileInputStream, but I'm not sure what is going on here. Martin >