Then there's the notorious backwards "R," the Chinese ankle tattoo of Russia tropes. Directors like to swap it for a regular English "R" in text overlays to indicate "We are in Russia now." Even though the "я" in Russian makes a "ya" sound.

The 1998 space-cowboy drama Armageddon nearly sparked an international crisis because it portrayed the Russian astronaut as a drunken lout. "How can Hollywood be so blind when it portrays a Russian cosmonaut as a drunkard wearing a fur cap? They should have added a bear and a nesting doll!” a Moscow Province Ministry of Culture official railed. One recent Russian parody imagined how a popular local TV show would be shot "in Hollywood." It of course involved bears, balalaikas, and a fat man speaking Russian like he's recovering from dental surgery.

You can't really blame TV and movie producers for their lack of Slavic sensitivity. Russians make excellent villains, but Hollywood isn't exactly overrun with Russian-American starlets. (Although, I'd be happy to hop on a plane.) And there were few opportunities for Russian and American artists to collaborate before the Soviet Union collapsed.

The other reason, I think, is that Russian would be insanely difficult for non-native actors to master. Occasionally American friends will ask me to "teach them some Russian." If we can make it past the mouthful that is "hello" ("zdravstvuyte"), we might move on to "please" ("pozhalusta"), which in Cyrillic includes a letter that looks like a spider and sounds like the noise you make when you slip on some ice. This is usually where we give up and thank God that English doesn't have three types of noun declension.

So I was delighted that The Americans opted to fill their Russian roles with natives—or at least people who know their way around a rolled "r." Lev Gorn, who plays KGB Rezident Arkady Ivanovich, was born in Stavropol. Costa Ronin, who plays Oleg, hails from the Baltic Russian outpost of Kaliningrad. Annet Mahendru, who plays the double-agent Nina, has a Russian mother and speaks six languages.

Using realistic-sounding characters, "was very important for us because the show was so much centered on the world of the Russian Russians and the Russian illegals, and the illegals were American actors," said Joe Weisberg, the show's creator (Matthew Rhys, who plays sleeper agent Philip, is actually Welsh). "We wanted everything else to be as authentic as possible. Not having Americans speaking with Russian accents was key to doing that. We had our one exception to that: [General] Zhukov, who was played by a Polish actor."

Other than Zhukov and the two main characters—who by conceit are to appear as American as possible—the only prominent non-Russian "Russian" on the show is Peter von Berg, who plays the KGB official Vasili Nikolayevich. Von Berg manages to speak Russian near-perfectly, though, perhaps because he has experience with Russian plays and was an accent coach.