"I should be able to read code written anywhere in the world and understand what it does"
You cannot read tons of code written in the 1C language [0] unless you know Russian, but I don't think it's a loss for you or for Russians because it's a scripting language used by a suit of enterprise software dealing mostly with ever changing Russian accounting standards and tax code [1].
At the same time it's economically effective to use Russian language because it lowers the entry barrier into 1C programming and allows domain experts to understand some of the code.
P.S. Yes, I didn't bother to read the second paragraph :)