I really like the 9k Most Common Russian Words deck. But for me, I think the best way is to make my own from vocabulary that I am encountering in whatever courses I’m taking or whatever context I’m learning in. I also like to add an example sentence and pronunciation audio, along with stress marks.

I don’t have much use for learning words out of context because I find them incredibly difficult to remember. I bolded that because I think it’s important, especially if you are still finding ways to make Anki effective for you.

For example, I (like a lot of people) started with Duolingo and Busuu and I learned about 700 words from that; I exported those word lists to Anki and am continuing to add words that I encounter in other courses and also from Russian native speakers on YouTube to the same deck. I still do Duolingo most days but it’s not very good at explaining things.