This article is a description of a research project rather than a presentation of the research itself. The aim of the research is a description of phonetic and functional properties of Russian intonation with a transcription system in unambiguous symbols that will be adapted for and implemented on the Internet as a free interactive research tool and learning module ToRI: Description and Transcription of Russian Intonation. The intended result is a reliable and reproducible transcription system for spoken corpora of Russian (Moscow and St Petersburg varieties), based on the formal description by Ode (1989) and inspired by ToDI {Transcription of Dutch Intonation Gussenhoven et al. 1999).2 As will be explained below, for theoretical and language specific reasons ToRI will considerably differ from ToDI in its description and transcription. To our knowledge, ToRI will be the first transcription of its kind in which experimentally verified relations between form and contextual function are expressed in unambiguous symbols. ToRI will be designed in such a way that it can be used as a learnable system for linguists and advanced students, as a research tool for fieldwork on Russian dialects, for the study of intonational contact phenomena of Russian dialects with local languages in Russia, and for comparative and language typology studies. ToRI might also be useful for the development of speech synthesis and, possibly, speech recognition.