Why not? One’s native or most fluent language often doesn’t
coincide with the language of the country in which one resides. Prior to this century, Russian actually wasn’t the language you could expect to hear in many situations in Russia. Members of the nobility (admittedly comprising only a small percentage of the population) conversed in French more frequently than not.
Weren’t there also quite a few non-Jewish Germans in Russia and aren’t there some still, maybe not so many speaking German though?
Ray
Yeah. You’re thinking of the “Volga Germans.”
Note that it’s widely known that the Romanov lineage, after centuries of importing foreign princesses for tsarinas, contained “not a drop of Russian blood.” (personal communication)
There are still some persons of definite German ancestry in Russia, but as far as I know they aren’t, y’know, “practicing.” I.e. they don’t speak German.
There are in fact many ethnic Germans in Russia, although many have now emigrated to Germany where the citizenship law allows all ethnic Germans to return to their “homeland”. This, however, does often become a bit of a farce, since many if not most of these people do not speak a word of German. Thus they are often seen in Germany as Russian posers, but tragically, due to their historic-traditional “ethnicity”, they are just as often seen in Russia as Germans, with all the negative associations that often entails.
Not an easy problem to solve, although most are happy enough to leave for Germany for economic reasons.