Nor is publishing in English going to be a rare and special event

Publication in general doesn't have to be rare and special, only the publications of negative results has to be uncommon. People just care less about publishing negative results and prefer to publish positive results; if there's X amount of effort for publication in a foreign language, and the positive studies already use up all of the X, no X is left for negative results... There's other issues, e.g. how many of those tests were re-testing simple, effective FDA-approved drugs and such?

Also, for the Soviet union, there would be a certain political advantage in finding no efficacy of drugs that are expensive to manufacture or import. And one big aspect of soviet backwardness was always the disbelief that something actually works.

Even assuming that the publications always found what ever experimenter wanted to find, it wouldn't explain that predominantly an effect is found. What's of the chemical safety studies? There's a very strong bias to fail to disprove the null hypothesis.

Unsurprisingly, pseudo-medicine and pseudo-science will vary by region

Yet your paper somehow found a ridiculously high positive rate for acupuncture. The way I think it would work, well, first thing first it's very difficult to blind acupuncture studies and inadequately blinded experiments should find positive result from the placebo effect, secondarily, because that's the case, nobody really cares about that effect, and thirdly, de-facto the system did not result in construction of acupuncture centres.

I haven't really noticed nootropics being a big thing, and various rat maze studies were and are largely complete crap anyway. To the point that the impact of experimenter's gender got only discovered recently.

edit: also if we're looking at Russia from 1991 to 1998, that was the time when scientists and other such government employees were literally not getting paid their wages. I remember that time, my parents were not paid for months at a time, they were reselling shampoo on the side to get some cash.