I hadn't paid much heed to this thread, but since I'm posting like a Mad Thing tonight, I thought I would give the ol' OED a looksee; imagine my surprise to find that informatics has been around since 1967 and Russian is given as the etymological source!
[tr. Russ. informátika (A. I. Mikhailov et al. 1966, in Nauchno-tekhnicheskaya Informatsiya XII. 35), f. information: see -ics.]
(See quot. 1967.) Cf. information science (information 8). Hence infor"matical a., informa"tician.
1967 FID News Bull. XVII. 73/2 Informatics is the discipline of science which investigates the structure and properties (not specific content) of scientific information, as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methodology and organization. 1970 Times 2 Sept. 9 It was agreed+that an introduction to Informatics should form an integral part of general education. 1972 Jrnl. Librarianship IV. 177 The name Informatics satisfies several criteria for the designation of a new discipline. Ibid., Other terms can be derived from it, such as Informatician for a person who is engaged in activities in this field+and the adjective informatical, to describe the attributes of the field. 1973 Times Lit. Suppl. 28 Sept. 1133/1 The problem falls into two parts: the preparation of decisions, which is a matter of informatics, and the making of the decisions themselves, which is a matter of ‘politics’.
(sometimes I wonder about the folks who dig out these citations -- don't they have lives?)