Not exactly. Officer in the Russian army could be Yakut, Aleut, Caucasian (from the Caucasus), a baptized Jew, and he could beat the Russian soldier in the face. In England, this could be?
Like I said, the Russian Empire was a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural state. The soldiers came from different backgrounds and were traditionally more bound to their loyalty and service to the Tsar than Russia as an nation. This kind of practice was common in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, say, with the nobility serving various rulers and often quickly changing their loyalties. The Finnish nobility was loyal to the Swedish crown until 1809, after that the sons of Finnish noblemen made illustrious careers in the Russian army. Oscar von Kraemer, the son of Finland-Swedish nobles, made it to full Admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy and a member of the State Council.
But it still was a Russian army and a Russian state. I am fairly sure, for example, that inability (or unwillingness) to learn at least passable Russian would have placed a definite "glass ceiling" on one's career in the Tsar's service. Modernization in the military, too, meant streamlining, harmonizing, standardizing - and Russification. Together with a growing sense of nationalism, by the turn of the 20th century this was undermining the sort of ethnicity-blind, premodern class privileges that were still known and understood among the officer corps.