I remember my father, who is a pioneering businessman of sort, traveling to Russia frequently in the early 90's and who would tell me of the horrifying air travel conditions the passenger has to put up with, from unannounced and frequent cancellation of flights, Soviet-style "service" onboard and the constant fear that he won't arrive at his destination in one piece, if at all.
Of course, those were in the immediate post-USSR days, when money and training were in short supply in Russia. My father would say some of the Russian pilots were paid worse than a bus driver, if at all. He has since retired but he still enjoys telling me of his traveling adventures in those early days of post-Soviet Russia. Thankfully, nowadays things have changed for the better, service-wise.
However, one thing that hasn't changed is flight safety, or the lack thereof in Russia. In 2011, Russia and the CIS region had the worst overall air safety record in the world, as tracked by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Measuring the number of hull losses (a crash that renders the aircraft irreparable) per million sectors (a flight that includes a takeoff and a landing), the Russia-CIS region suffered a total accident rate of 8.19 hull losses per million sectors, compared to 6.17 in Africa and 1.33 in North America. (
http://themoscownews.com/russia/2013...ue-yonder.html)
Now in fairness, there are two classes of Russian carriers. The ones flying Western airliners (i.e. Aeroflot, S7 Airlines) are generally pretty safe. The smaller localized carriers flying Russian jets however are not (and almost all crashes in the last few years came from these carriers). The infamous Lokomotiv Yaroslavl air disaster in 2011, which killed the entire KHL team when their Yak-42 crashed (a Soviet version of the 727), was a notorious case of Russia's poor air safety.
That being said, from your perspective, do you feel safe flying on a Russian carrier in general?