I very much admire westerners who managed the necessary communication travelling through Russia. Russian is extremely difficult for foreigners (as are other Slavic languages - but at least Polish is written in Latin). I am Polish and I speak Russian fluently, however even I, travelling through Russia, have moments that somebody speaking fast, using strange accent, gives me hard time to understand him. Also reading in Cyrylic, especially any official documents with bureaucratic language, is not easy. But, at least in Russia everybody speaks Russian. Situation however is worsening in countries being former Soviet Republics, especially in those, which are currently rather Russia-unfriendly. (E.g. Georgia). In those countries the knowledge of Russian is decreasing. Still, anybody at the age of 45+ speaks Russian quite good, but amongst young people the knowledge of Russian dissappears. The goverments do some effort in teaching English, so you can expect that well educated young man speaks quite good English, but it is definitely not common phenomenon yet. For example, if you encounter a young saleswoman in rural Georgian shop, she rather certainly will not know any other language than Georgian. And who knows Georgian? And if Cyrylic alphabet is difficult, then Georgian is much more. To varying degrees, this phenomenon affects the other post-Soviet countries.
JO