Russia is obviously some kind of monolith....
Russia, like a lot of eastern Europe, contains a lot of over educated and under paid individuals, people who have access to computers and the Internet. As they say, "Idle hands make the Devil's workshop" - faced with opportunity to make money and a global environment of less than secure operating environments there's going to be a whole lot of hacking going on.
Whether this is sponsored by the Russian government is problematical. The Russian government does seem to be pragmatic as distinct from our own governments that appear to be driven by ideology so I wouldn't be surprised if they were aware of what was going on to a certain extent. I could even see them indulging in wholesale tool development like the NSA (except where is our Kaspersky? They were instrumental in uncovering a lot of the more obscure NSA exploits but somehow we don't have much information about similar exploits from Russia except in the form of over-generalized Cold War style rumblings from politicians).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
