English does seem to have much more one-syllable words than Russian (some of them, like "Help!" are quite useful ). I tried to find some statistical data, and the result was a little surprising:

Average English world length is 5.10 letters.
Average English sentence length is 14.3 words.
English sentence and word average length

Average Russian world length is 5.28 letters.
Average Russian sentence length is 10.38 words.
The frequency dictionary for Russian

For comparison, Korean averages 3.05 letters and the German average is 6.26 letters.
Much of this, and also word length, depends on the subject and audience.

There's also a well-known joke related to our discussion (I don't know if the info regarding words length is correct, but it's amusing anyway)

Analyzing WW2 American scientists discovered an interesting fact: in a heat of a battle Americans usually made decisions much faster than Japanese, and as a result could often beat even superior numbers.

Trying to explain this they found a pattern: average word's length in English is 5.2 symbols, while average Japanese word during battle was 10.8. Therefore Japanese commanders needed almost twice as much time as Americans to give a command.

Out of curiosity they analyzed Russian speech. It turned out that average Russian words length is 7.2 letters, but in critical situations Russian commanders resort to offensive language (Russian mat) which shortens an average word length to... 3.2 letters. The reason is that some word combinations and even sentences can be replaced with one word (after that there is an example in Russian with a lot of curse words which is supposed to be the most funny part of the joke )