Most of the four million people are former Russians of German descent as well as Jews and other people who came to Germany from former Soviet republics. Berlin also attracts wealthy Russians from Moscow and St. Petersburg who come to the German capital to shop. In and around Berlin’s elegant Kurfürstendamm you can sometimes hear as much Russian spoken as in the 1920s, when refugees from the Russian Revolution arrived in droves. The developments that began back then found their conclusion in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.