What should be shocking to us monocultural North Americans is that 7 languages is not even particularly uncommon among Russians and other Eastern Europeans.
I spend a couple of summers working on Polish fishing ships. Almost everyone spoke at least four languages - Polish, Russian, German, and some combination of Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Spanish, English. Not just the officers (most of whom spoke at least 6 or 7, some of whom spoke 10 or more), but the fishermen were all multilingual.
Part of that was the legacy of the USSR etc, but it is also just a function of where they are.
