Russian dataset (from the Lenta.ru news agency) is a publicly-available set of 699,746 news articles in the Russian language dated between 1999 and 2018 from the Lenta.ru online news agency (available at kaggle). Each news item was manually assigned to one of ten topic classes by the dataset provider. We have created a class-balanced subset of this dataset, which consisted of 8624 news texts (containing 23,297 unique words).