Lets take H&H server statistics as an example?
There are 256 hearthlings playing.
Of these, there are 54 from Russian Federation, 51 from Korea, 30 from United States, 20 from Poland, and 19 from Japan.
Most of the active players are bots, for sure, but if we take these numbers as an example of Salem player actvity, you will see see, that the game's fans mostly live in US, Poland, Russia and Korea.
Since folks from European countries (including Poland) have less probles with ingame English language, it is more problematic to identify them, so for a casual player, the whole playerbase consists of english-speaking folks, japs and russians. And while most of koreans and japanese heartlings peacefully live alltogether, russian players are spread all around the Salem continent, and some of them had even caused pretty much troubles to the neighbours.
So, for an average mind, Salem world consists of "good hermits", "bad folks" (minor agressve factions like Tripe), "koreans" and "bad russians". Since there is no other common non-english nationality, russians become a nominal term and that is a reason why they are a common topic to discuss. Very few players do have any private business with the russian community thats why there are so few voices that can speak positive about it.
Hope that answers the question.