I have heard it said more than once, most recently on Secrets of the Dead, and each time it has struck me as a most unfortunate conflation of the twentieth-century state of Russia with the past and future Russian nation: American T.V. histories, documentaries, and newscasts have taken to insisting that the name of the Soviet government was not Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but rather “Russia.”