It wasn't the concept of a fake Russian village that puzzled me - it was just that it didn't seem to add anything to the plot. So my guess was that it was a genuine fake which was a handy location for filming, and they wrote in a line to explain (truthfully) why it looked Russian, rather than that the script called for a fake Russian village so they redecorated a village which happened to be deserted. In some ways it would have been simpler to say that they were in a deserted Russian village, except that, as I say, they would have had to explain why the people working there weren't Russian, eg Pritchard's company had bought the mining rights from the government and sent in their own crew.