the number of Russian speakers is much higher due to the fact that in the soviet times there were M citizens and they were all educated in russian another M  studied and were able to speak in this language  it is highly unreasonable to have just M first language speaker we are talking about language and not ethnicity there are M russians in russia and they all speak in russian plus M russian speakers in Ukraine all ukrainians know russian  M and all the belarussians speak in russian M millions of russian speakers as a first language in central Asia and so on  httpwwwignatiusedufacultyturnerlanguageshtm