1. Russiagate primed them. There was this idea that Russia somehow caused Donald Trump to win the election. In reality Donald Trump simply won the election because a lot of Americans were deeply in favor of his overtly racist policies and brash rhetorical style. Liberals simply did not want to believe that about half of voting Americans were willing to elect Donald Trump, so they concocted a giant cope based on flimsy evidence and wasted everyone’s time for 3 years with kabuki theater about Russia. They ignored each and every opportunity to focus on Trump’s actual unsavory policy decisions, and chose instead to turn the media into a 24/7 propaganda theater for the “Mueller Investigation.” This is partly because any serious criticism they could have of Donald Trump were things they could also be accused of. The funniest thing was Robert Mueller was a Republican FBI agent. Liberals so deeply believe in the mythical bourgeois “civility” and “bipartisanship” of the American ruling class that they actually thought a conservative Republican FBI agent was going to save America from Donald Trump. For three years.

2. Since the collapse of the USSR, the cold war never ended. The US continued to wage cold war against the former soviet and (to a lesser extent) Warsaw pact countries, including Russia and Ukraine. The US waged clandestine proxy wars against “regimes” which could potentially become “near peer” powers, either economically, politically, culturally, or scientifically, and disrupt the US’s unrivaled global hegemony. To this end the US armed extremist reactionaries in regions with “threatening” governments in an attempt to destabilize potential rivals. The US, through its intelligence agencies, and policy-laundering think tanks like the NED, armed, trained, and funded reactionary groups all over the planet. Including in Ukraine. These groups were often “terrorists,” according to the bourgeois logic, and the US simultaneously waged a “war on terror” against these groups it often had deep financial ties to. The US was a firefighter by day, and an arsonist by night, if that analogy helps. It created problems for other countries just to simultaneously pretend to solve them. A false hero narrative.

3. Propaganda. People in the United States have been primed through every form of media to believe that Communism is evil, that Russia is the source of Communism (rather than it being an international working class ideology), and that Russia never stopped being communist, that they are only pretending to be Capitalists, like snakes in the grass, waiting for an opportunity to strike. There’s even a famous Simpsons joke pretending this is the case. Combine this idea with Russiagate, and you have an “Evil Empire” that America needs to defeat. Liberals think destroying and balkanizing Russia and former soviet countries and turning them into economic vassals of NATO is a worthy and moral goal, that it represents spreading of freedom and democracy, and anti-authoritarianism. They believe putting in puppets who take out huge IMF loans and doing shock therapy privatization, deregulation, austerity, banning of labor unions, etc. are all wonderful things and that these countries deserve to go through this for being Communist

4. The Victims of Communism memorial foundation (which was created with bipartisan funding and US tax dollars) and other similar think tanks have put out Nazi apologist and anti-communist propaganda for 30 years. The death of the elderly holocaust survivors and WW2 veterans have all but destroyed the remaining memory of Soviet heroism, and the proliferation of narratives like Holodomor being a deliberate man-made famine perpetrated by Stalin to punish Ukraine, “human wave attacks” by Soviets, Nazi collaborators simply being anti-soviet freedom fighters, etc. etc. has created an environment ripe for fascism and Russophobia.

There’s probably more I’m not thinking of but that’s the gist of it.