Johanna, I assume that one thing which is different in Russia and Germany is that Russia, especially the former Soviet Union, is such a vast territory in which Russian, or indeed any Slavic language, was just the indigenous language of a relatively small area. Ukrainian, Byelorussian are languages in their own right because they are located in a certain political territory, but they are pretty close to Russian. I mean, I can read and understand texts in Ukrainian based on what I know about Russian. The differences are smaller than between German and Dutch, for instance, but Dutch itself is technically just another German dialect. Don't tell the Dutch, though. But the local dialect of Germans near the Dutch border is, to all intents and purposes, the same as the Dutch dialect of Dutch people living on the other side of the border. Walk from village to village from, say, Hannover eastwards towards the Netherlands, and you will see how relatively clean HIgh German morphs into Dutch.

In Russia, however, you get a lot more ethnicities whose territories were incorporated into the Soviet Union (or the large political bodies which preceded it, beginning with the Kiev Rus) but who originally did not speak any Slavic language at all. In such territories, there are no dialects but accents of the Russian (2nd) language at best, influenced by the indigenous language. You can compare this situation to the US, where English used to be a second language for the people who first moved there, so that today East Coast and West Coast American English are less distinct from each other than the English spoken in any two British villages 50 miles apart.

In Gemany you get the added problem that the nation as such only formed relatively late in history. France, Britain (or at least England), Russia had long been actual nations with an aristocracy the language of which was seen as the 'standard dialect', when Germany was mostly an collection of fragmented mini states.

There was also a dialectal shift which separated the northern German dialects (called Low German (Niederdeutsch) because the north is less elevated, dropping off towards the sea, whereas the South is more elevated, rising towards the alps, giving us 'High' or rather 'Upper German (Oberdeutsch)). This dialectal shift refers to certain consonantal differences. The northern dialects retain the old consonant system which gives us, for instance, 'water' for 'Wasser' just as it is in English and, I expect, the Scandinavian Germanic languages. The Southern dialects made that shift, replacing a number of consonants.

Then Luther came along and wrote his German Bible translation. Protestantism grew strong in the North, but in effect they had to learn the Biblical German like a 2nd language because Luther had based his translation on Southern German dialects which were practically incomprehensible to Northern Germans. This language replaced local Northern dialects to such an extent that today they seem comparatively weak and rare, even extinct in places, in comparison to Southern dialects. High German, the German you would have to learn as a 2nd language and which is the language of the media, is an artificial construct based on that Biblical language - it is a language which is not actually spoken in any given region of Germany as an indigenous language. It is not the Tsar's (or Moscow's) Russian, not the King's (or Paris') French, not the Queen's English, it is an artificial construct. Some places pride themselves on speaking the most clean High German, for example Hannover, but that just means that the local dialects had in fact been suppressed in these places most effectively.

I live in Remscheid, that's some 40 km from Cologne. Cologne has a distinct dialect which has survived and is very much alive. I can understand it pretty well, though a learner of German would have a hard time with it. Remscheid has a distinct dialect which is almost extinct and is very different from that of Cologne; if a person well-versed in that dialect used it in conversation with me I would probably not be able to follow it. People from more Southern areas, even if they speak what they think is High German, often speak a German so coloured by their Swabian, Frankonian, Saxonian or Bavarian areas that sometimes I just don't understand them. If they actually speak their dialect it might just as well be Suaheli for all it's worth.

Robin