Note I am a pro-Soviet communist, but I’ll tell from the American perspective for a while:
America has never existed without an enemy to rally against, whether it was the British, the natives, the Confederacy (and the Yanks respectively). The two biggest enemies America ever rallied against were the Axis and the Soviet Union, with the Axis being the enemy in the greatest war in human history who America could gloat over, and the Soviet Union being the enemy for the majority of our parent’s young lifetime and the majority of their parents lifetime.
The USSR for Americans was almost like the most worthy of its foes, a nation that was America’s opposite, and as we know with opposites they tend to mirror each other in key ways. Both were born from rebellion (America was a rebellion for slavery and genocide IMO, the USSR was a rebellion against them), both took up a massive landmass in their respective continents (US is a third of North America, the USSR was practically a subcontinent), both lead their respective spheres of the world, both could claim and gloat over victory over the Axis, both were technologically advanced (before we started pretending like the Soviets were savages Soviet super tech was a trope), and both were the center of the Cold War. Unlike the Nazis, the Soviets were seen as bad but weren’t cartoonishly evil villains whose plans included genociding entire groups of people and remaking the world as a racial hierarchy, it was a true battle of ideology.
Imo all this Russia shit, beyond just being a distraction Porky drafted up, is psychologically pleasing for Americans, for the boomers that feed into this nonsense the most, Russia being the enemy reminds them of the Cold War, a time they’ve more or less completely forgotten under nostalgia where life was simple and the enemy wasn’t no every brown person in existence, but the strange Eastern society that had all the nukes. Hence why they’re calling people comrade, why they have Putin with the hammer and sickle, and why they’re actively pretending as though the USSR still exists.
Americans wish the USSR still exists because it was a more believable enemy than terrorists are, at least the USSR relied far more or nationalism, whereas terrorists is straight up racism and little else, and obviously not a real threat.
Just my thoughts