Learning Russian is a must. Yes you can live for that cheap, if you like the older Soviet-era grungy apartments further from the metro (I love them). It's hard

Learning Russian is a must. Yes you can live for that cheap, if you like the older Soviet-era grungy apartments further from the metro (I love them). It's hard to make any kind of meaningful connections if you don't speak Russian. And there are gangsters who can be openly hostile to non-Russian speaking people - but if you speak Russian and know how to carry yourself like a native you'll be fine, no matter the colour of your skin. Few people speak more than a few words of English, though there is a small native-English-speaking expat community in Moscow. I've been studying Russian for 6 months part-time, and I speak enough to make friends, though I definitely plan to dedicate another year of full-time studies to become fluent.