In what Russians wrote about themselves there is no fatalism, but there is concept of "Avos". "Avos'" is used in the same sense as the Arab "insh'allah" (or, say, Spanish "ojalá") - "let's hope that..." and when Russians are asked why they're doing completely doomed things it's said they do it on "Avos'". For example, one of the ships of Nikolay Rezanov sailed on to take possession of the Columbia river in 1806 was called "Avos'". Indeed it ultimately failed. Avos'ka, or the little Avos', is what the Russians called the nets that you received as shopping bags in the Soviet era because, as the comedian Arkadiy Raykin put it, you said "avos' something will still be in the netting when I'm home".

Russian 19th writers would discuss it as a particular trait of the Russian character and from there it might have been translated as "fatalism". But they didn't just make it responsible for a submission to the fate but also to hopeless and irrational daredevil insurrections against it.