[Vermont Lt]

No. I think just about everyone in the west thinks Russia sucks. Their culture sucks. Their books suck, Their army sucks.

The average Russian just looks miserable, and they don’t understand why we don’t want to share their miserable existence.

I am sure that ok individuals over there, somewhere, so I am generalizing. But even in the large Russian population in my area the people look miserable; they just get better booze.

[Republican in occupied CA]

Let’s put them out of their misery.

I’ve lived my entire life with those bastards pointing nuclear missiles at me, time to put the bear down.

Nothing good has come from Russia since Tchaikovsky kicked the bucket.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

#7: >"But even in the large Russian population in my area the people look miserable"

No offense, but if I lived in Vermont, I'd be miserable too. You and your Russian friends must be knee deep in your rasputitsa.

[hanamizu]

“Their books suck, “

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Some of their books are pretty good, but the problem reading them are the names. You have the first name like Vladimir followed by a patronymic, your father’s name followed by ‘ovich’ for a male and ‘ova’. So let’s say you’re named after your dad, you’d be called Vladimir Vladimirovich. And then a family name is added, let’s use Putin.

But we’ve just gotten started. Russians have loads of nicknames for every first name and they often don’t have any resemblance to the first name. Vova and Volodya are common nicknames for Vladimir. But the nicknames also have variations. So Vova can become Vovka, Vovochka, Vovchik, Vladik, Vovan, and Volodya can become Volod’ka, Volodyen’ka and more.

So a character in a Russian novel can be called by any of these variants. The Russian reader will know who’s being referred to but for the rest of us...