With Babelfish and the availability of publications online, I can only see poverty entering into it if they're too poor to afford the internet.
You way overestimate Babelfish (and translate.google.com).And Internet access is one thing, but paywalls are another. The French National Museum of Natural History doesn't give its employees online access to Nature, Science, or the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology... the University of Vienna does subscribe to Nature and Science online, but stopped carrying the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences in 2000 and has never subscribed to the JSP...
Averianov does lots of good work, for instance. Perhaps unsurprisingly based on your comments, he's from St. Petersburg.
Yes and yes.