Comment by ogurechny

Until recently, .SU had very little to with “Russian government”. Its Wikipedia article is a kitchen sink of useless facts which gave the post author the false sense he knows something about the topic.

SU TLD was given to Soviet Unix Users Group when Demos/Relcom (mostly the same people forming SUUG, regarded as first internet provider in USSR) joined the EUNet. Some relevant discussion can probably be found in old Usenet posts. At the time, finding someone in Soviet — and, shortly afterwards, Russian — government who understood what a domain name was would be a miracle. Further Internet-related committees and legal entities would be formed in the '90s by people from that tech circle.

I suppose the combination of personal contacts between people who created current Internet management organizations, inertia, long growth and transfer period of RU, and probably a convenience of making some money from yearly registration fees resulted in endless deprecated-but-active-in-all-regards state. It seems to me that making everyone using it move because of some formal decision would be as abrupt as making most of .com/.net/.org users move to specific country TLDs which they should formally use. Given how many crapTLDs have been created recently, its notability seems to dwindle.