The russkies were doing the same. Read Thomas Rid's Active Measures. Choice quote from KGB colonel on publishing in western media: "If we didn't have the free press we would have had to invent it"
Pelmeni (пельмени) sometimes becomes pelmenis, but like with pierogi I usually see the plural form without the `s` in English (in America at least).
I think "blintzes" too, from Yiddish `blintse` by way of Slavic.
Whatever the rules, eventually whatever is easier for locals to say will be what people go with.
> The only other Slavic-to-English example of this sort I know is pierogis, from Polish (the nominative singular form is pieróg).
Not speaking Polish whenever I heard "pierogis" in English, I assumed all Americans meant was Russian "pirogi". So was expecting fluffy yeast leavened baked goodies, instead I got boiled vareniky/pelimini/dumplings.
Transliterations make it easy to confuse the difference between the grammatical endings of русский (singular, masculine adjective used as singular noun) and русские (plural adjective used as plural noun). The end of English "Russkie" is pronounced more like the end of "русский", while the plural "русские" would be something like RUSS-key-yay in English, ROOS-key-yay in Russian.
The general rule for making singulars plural in English is adding -s. The general rule for Russian nominative-case adjectives is adding -ые or -ие. Granted, native Russian speakers often speed through and slur unstressed grammatical endings, so the difference isn't always discernible in speech.
While the absolute worst part of American society and culture did approach the more casual evils that Communism produced it all pales compared to the scale and pervasiveness of what Russians suffered and perpetrated. American criticisms were frustrated by some hypocrisy but they didn’t fall flat except to the willfully ignorant of what went on during Communism.
Anyway, public discourse will always have someone pushing an agenda. Nabisco, CIA, your local Instagram influencer. It's a race to the bottom. That's why bastions of unbiased investigative journalism is just such a precious thing.
Making them targets for influence. A circle of propaganda life. The soil must be tilled.
Maybe the CIA will shift into doing things “for the better” so that inherent value is raised across the world?
The irony, naivete, and logical inconsistency of this planet and Westerners in particular is mind boggling.
The system is far from perfect, and it has suffered horribly in the part 20 years from loss of ad revenue, but my local Mercury News is going to give me better local reporting than Pravda would for Muscovites, or Xinhua for anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoners_in_the_Uni...
Again though I agree with you, whatboutism is just enforcing precedent.