This chapter focuses on Russian and its heritage language use, maintenance and transmission in Cyprus (which shares the Eastern Orthodox religion with Russia), in Estonia (part of the USSR until 1991) and Sweden (a somewhat neutral country vis-à-vis the USSR and Russia). Drawing on theoretical issues of family language policy, we investigated multilingual families, consisting of majority language (MajL)-speaking and Russian-speaking members, examining whether Russian is maintained and transferred to the next generation. Under ‘multilingual family’, we include four situations: (1) a Russian speaker and a MajL speaker, (2) a Russian-MajL mixed speaker and a MajL speaker, (3) both parents are Russian-MajL mixed speakers (common in Estonia) and (4) both parents are Russian speakers (more common in Cyprus). Our results show the discrepancies between the desired and valid efforts and choices in Russian-language transmission. We examined how these phenomena occurred and what practical issues and societal factors affected the Russian language in the (home) lives of the families.