There were three types of German communities in Imperial Russia at the time of Dostoevsky's writing. I have written about the Volga Germans and the Baltic Germans in prior answers. But other than the Volga and Baltic Germans, the other sorts of Germans that tended to be running around the Tsarist state were the ones that clustered in Russia's growing nineteenth-century cities. Unlike the Volga and Baltic populations, these Germans were not drawn from long-established communities. Instead, a good many of them were recent immigrants or at the time of Crime and Punishment's writing, the children of these immigrants. These Germans found themselves inside Russia because of opportunities within the Russian Empire. The presence of a number of Germans within the Russian state apparatus reduced the importance language barrier and the Romanovs' immigration policy of "attract and hold" meant a number of German specialists found themselves in the service of the Tsar. The 1897 census found 47.1 % of the empire's urban Germans were specialists with technical training and the remainder were in the free professions. German entrepreneurs were one component of the industrialization of the Empire and sometimes maintained connection with industrial concerns back in Germany. Other Germans were involved in the Russian university system or were themselves involved in schooling German emigres inside Russia. Overall, this segment of the German minority inside Russia was more prosperous and upscale than the Volga Germans, who were mostly involved in agriculture, but did not have the privileged access to state institutions as the Baltic Germans.

The disaster for the German community in Russia was both World Wars. The First World War brought suspicions of the Germans' loyalty, which had been growing since German unification in 1871, to the fore. The German communities suffered various degrees of discrimination during the last years of the Romanovs. A good many Germans left Russia during the Civil War, but enough remained in the USSR to qualify as a national minority classification by the state. This toleration did not survive Barbarossa and the remaining Soviet Germans, aside from KPD exiles, became enemy aliens in the eyes of the state.