I saw all of them. Also the ones he’d dropped in a couple other threads that also, regardless of topic, have joined his (?) personal row in the Cornfield.
Let’s be mindful of where we are and speak no more of this recent unpleasantness.
Exactly. It’s a good life, after all.
Yes; a Good Life. 
Posting this carefully so as to not run afoul of a certain moderator, but even up to as recently as 2014-15, Republicans such as Rand Paul were criticizing Obama for being too weak on the Crimea issue and one of Romney’s more-quoted quips from the 2012 campaign was that Obama was being too accommodating of Russia - to which Obama fired back something about Romney being stuck in the Cold War. So it’s certainly not a matter of principle. I never saw any Republicans support Russia until they saw how much support for Russia got under Democrats’ skin, like a bully finding out what annoys his victim the most. That moment was the flip.
Under the Soviet Union, Russia wasn’t Russia; it was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or R.S.F.S.R.
When they got independence and became simply Russia, it was a relief.
This is a distinction without a difference. Россия (Rossia) was a word in use, and it referred to the RSFSR.
It makes a real difference for the low-level clerical poor schmucks with carpal tunnel syndrome to not have to write or type the five-word official name any more.
I’m sure legions of Russian third graders were also overjoyed not to have to write that out longhand. Over and over.
It’s a pity they couldn’t have made RUSSIA into a good acronym.
Russian United Socialist States of Imperial Asia.
I had to look that up to make sure that it wasn’t real. Well done.
I don’t understand this objection. Surely the choice as to whether to use the long form of a country’s name or the short form has more to do with what is being written, and for whom? I rarely write out “The United States of America,” but that’s the name; US and USA are not, but they are widely and commonly used. The same with Russia: not the official name, no, but certainly the common and correct name for RSFSR, and metonymously but less correctly used for the USSR in the same way that England is used to refer to the UK.
Whether or not it was strictly accurate, the Soviet Union was also frequently referred to simply as ‘Russia’ in other languages. See for example the Barbarossa decree and Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia. The country was frequently referred to as Russland in official German documentation during WWII.
Confluence of factors. The extreme right, by which I mean the Proud Boys and various white nationalists and neo-Nazis have always been friendly to Putin. Because authoritarianism. As for Republican mainstreamers, they were notably silent when Trump’s close ties to Russia became obvious, and remained silent afterwards. So in fact the great majority of them were never really anti-Russia or anti-Soviet to begin with. Stuart Stevens:
How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. … It was all a lie.
Lying and posturing in this case.
Russia had been infiltrating the GOP through NRA money since at least the 1990’s, and probably even earlier. We are seeing the results of a decades-long psy-op which resulted in everything from the Trump Presidency to redneck boys “rolling coal.”
Putin knew that climate change would be good for Russia. He supported big oil and sent money to the NRA through his oligarchs, who then bought themselves an American political party.
Good point. General Burkhalter never threatened to send Colonel Klink to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics front.
Excellent write up from Heather Cox Richardson - Letters from an American - today about the connection between the USSR/Russia and the GOP
This interesting article says how Russia has been moving in a different direction.
I think that it was that they saw how much Russia helped out Trump. At that point Putin became another constituency which they could please to help their election chances.
I find it doubtful that Russia set up a whole operation to just influence one election. I feel it’s much more likely that they’ve been providing illegal assistance to lots of Republican candidates in exchange for favorable treatment. The only difference with Trump is that he was dumb enough to talk publicly about the illegal assistance he was receiving.