Quote Originally Posted by Johanna
But the whole setup with his hotel room and how he got it was not exactly easy to understand...
Yes, now this situation is hardly imaginable. Well... even socialism had some flaws...

So to conclude: There is only ONE Russian dialect and the variations are minimal and only related to a few words. People who appear to have accents are people who speak Russian as a second and not first langauge.
That's it mainly.

Surely it can't always have been that way though?
It must be the result of some kind of language campaign, or perhaps of people moving around a lot..?
Ah! That was the 20th century. It was full of events and processes breaking traditional way of life and massive population relocations. Someone will surely say more...

In the 19th century there must have been dialects!!
The illiterate peasants in 19th century rural Russia can't have spoken school-book Russian!!
Well, even now there are different levels of colloquial language plus many slangs (related to age, profession etc.) but they seems to be mainly uniform across the Russian-spoken areas.

PS - so what does the Ukrainian G sound like?
In short Ukrainian Г is voiced Х while Russian Г is voiced К. In some variants Ukrainian Г is completely swallowed or replaced with non-syllable schwa. I think Ukrainian Г is close to French R.

Quote Originally Posted by sperk
I'm wondering what the Ukranian R sounds like.
Er?
I think Ukrainian Р is exactly the same as Russian Р.