In my defense, it was Russians I knew (including, co-incidentally, a scholar of the Holodomor) who introduced me to and repeated the wry linguistic joke. The sense I got was that it was a positive, rebellious stereotype in the vein of “you pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”. As someone who loathes the Protestant Work Ethic I was always kind of on board with them, so more sympathy than superiority.
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