Russian non-standard (??) pronunciation

[Dr Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Gerhart is quite right. Gorbachev is Russian,  with a broad provincial
accent and lots of dialect. I was flabbergasted by hearing
"za" instead of "o" meaning <about> from a person from  Odessa
this summer...

As to the once-fashionable R sound, I would like to add
  1. In Tolstoj's War and Peace, General Kutuzov is conspicuous by
    speaking G instead of R. This means other aristos did not say so.
  2. Lenin's recorded speech is a good sample of an educated accent of
     the last century. It is high pitched, fast, equipped with German R...
     It is rather funny, indeed.
  3. My acquaintance with Russian aristocratic accent is limited (heard
     emigres speak it in Paris and Oxford fifteen -- twenty years ago),
     but I say none of them spoke like Lenin. They tend to speak very fast,
     with lots of neutral vowels instead of a very open AH for "o", with
     very clear emphasis, in a word, in a dramatic way.
  4. Some Russians (I haven't personally heard non-Jews do) pronounce
     R like Germans, but their accent is usually very flat compared with
     aristos or some drama characters. Thus they never give any impression
     of superiority or educatedness, at least to me. That accent is simply
     a sign of a particular group of people in society.
  5. Though in Soviet days everyone was encouraged to speak and write the
     way Moscow does, defective accent (from Moscow point of view) never was
     a serious problem. Remember that Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev
     were heads of Russia in spite of their accent.
     Russia has become very plebian since 1917, anyway.

Just a word for foreigners learning Russian: it is best to stick to a
single accent whatever it is. It would be terrible if one spoke one word in
Moscow way, another in Leningrad way, yet another in Southern way in
a single sentence. This is inevitable when teachers came from various
backgrounds and the pupil is not good enough to distinguish them. It
may be allowed at a beginner's level, but not at the advanced level where
awareness of style is taken care of.

Cheers,
Tsuji