For drilling my listening comprehension skills in Russian I use audio news where they provide a reasonable faithful transcript (so far I haven't found a site, where they provided a 1:1 transcript).
In addition the news anchormen often speak a very fast Russian, so to be even able to understand it initially I have to slow the tempo of the audio down, but for that I have to download it:

On http://www.ntv.ru/novosti you can download videos
+ the transcription are supplied


The downloaded video is in the mp4 format
2 options now
1a) convert with mplayer into wav-format:
   mplayer -ao pcm:file="out.wav" "in.mp4"

1b) convert with ffmpeg directly into mp3-format:
   ffmpeg -i "in.mp4" -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128 "out.mp3"

2) If tempo is too fast to comprehend, slow the tempo with soundstretch (pitch won't be changed!):
   soundstretch "in.wav" "out.mp3" -tempo=-20




That slows down the tempo 20%.
Soundstretch needs a wave-file as input!