Actually, I am partially mistaken – my Russian is pretty crusty. For animate nouns, the masculine does take the accusative declension ending. But, in all plurals and inanimate masculine and neuter nouns, the nominative and accusative are the same form. So, if you wanted to say “the (people of) the city saw the soldiers”, word order would matter (though, the larger context would help).
Curiously, Russian verbs in the present tense inflect for person/number, but the past tense forms only inflect for gender (or number). In the present tense, a first or second person pronoun can be omitted, meaning word order is flexible, but in the past tense it may not make sense to omit the subject pronoun.
Context, of course, helps immensely. I think this is the case with many or all languages.