The Reds are still under the bed: The Russians continue to be the great bogeymen of American pop culture

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and the USSR collapsed two years later, the US claimed full victory in every way.

For a decades-long conflict that featured primarily proxy wars in other countries such as Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan, so much of animus between the US and the Russians played off the battlefield.

It was a war of ideas, philosophies and ways of life – and where battle to fight that than in the culture.

Pop culture is an undisputed form of soft power, and throughout the Cold War, Hollywood undoubtedly helped win the hearts and minds of the world over with its movies and TV shows espousing good, old-fashioned American values of white picket fences, democracy and Coca-Cola.

Since the Cold War ended almost four decades ago, the pipeline of stories about the American-Russian rivalry hasn’t really slowed. The Russkis are still, with occasional nuance but usually not, the onscreen villains.

The latest is the upcoming streaming movie Mayday, a comedy with Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. It’s set during the Cold War and is about an American fighter pilot who crashes behind enemy lines only to be rescued by a Russian carpenter.

Branagh plays the chippie and his character is obsessed with American culture. The comedy comes out in September, but the trailer suggests that this unlikely ally is a good guy because he’s so enamoured with the superiority of American consumerism.

He says he’s never had McDonald’s, but suspects he would love it – joke’s on him.

Americans will often draw on the nostalgia of an era when there were seemingly clear-cut delineations between white (west) and black (east) hats. Focusing on the Soviets, the most powerful opposition in the world at the time, made it much easier to not look within.

Now, enemies are varied and less defined, with non-state actors lurking in the shadows as much of a threat as foreign powers, while technology companies have unleashed destructive platforms that spread disinformation and propaganda. Wasn’t it just much easier when the answer to every question was the Soviets?

Perhaps that’s why there continues to be these screen projects set during the Cold War. It’s harder to a contemporary series about the differences between the US and Russia when democratic norms are being bulldozed by the current occupant of the White House.

The recently cancelled comedy-drama series PONIES, starring Emilia Clark and Hayley Lu Richardson, was centred on two 1970s American wives of CIA officers who find themselves embroiled in spy work after their husbands are killed.

The primary antagonist of that first – and now only – season was a ruthless KGB agent who used brutal violence as his first response to any slight or suspicion. There’s a clear binary in this series, even in the little things like the monthly imports to the US embassy from Sweden of American consumer goods or the inferiority of Russian-made cars.

But mostly it’s in the characterisation of us good, them bad. There were suggestions that this would be become more complicated with a season two set-up that would explore wrongdoing on the American side.

In these various movies and TV shows, where there are “good” Russians, it’s those who are either rebelling against or victims of their own government.

Take, for example, Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of the video game Tetris, who was dramatised as a character in the 2023 movie Tetris. He’s a minor character in the film which exaggerated the peril faced by the Dutch-born American game designer, Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), when he was in the USSR trying to negotiate the rights.

The film portrayed an Argo-style chase-to-the-airport by the KGB, which didn’t happen, nor was Rogers beaten by agents. But Pajitnov did say that while Hollywood dramatised those events, it was a manifestation of the climate of fear he felt at the time.

These “good” or “exploited” Russians often ended up in the West by the end of these films and TV shows, even in seemingly frivolous projects such as superhero stories.

In the Marvel movies, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), a Russian assassin that was trained by the fictional Red Room, would work for the US government-affiliated SHIELD, while her compatriots and fake family Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour) would eventually return to the US.

The Americans is the obvious example of a 21st century TV series that examined that east/west divide during the Cold War. Starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, the acclaimed drama was about two KGB agents who formed a secret cell in the D.C. suburbs, living as if they were regular Americans while secretly working against the US.

This was a much more complex series about the east versus west, in part embodied in the differing attitudes of Elizabeth/Nadezhda and Philip/Mischa. He was starting to be won over by the comfort of American life while her loyalties remained with the USSR and decried the wastage of the west.

The series didn’t draw easy lines, everyone was right and wrong and often at the same time. Even the other Russian characters had dimensions, and made choices that were relatable.

The Americans is one of the great TV series of this century, and the fact it never adhered to binaries was part of it.

As Vladimir Putin increasingly consolidated his power in Russia and re-introduced Soviet-era policies and social dictates, American screen culture has sought to capture that shift.

The latter seasons of long-running espionage thriller Homeland verged from its earlier pre-occupations with the Middle East by focusing on Russia and its interference in the American political system including through disinformation-spreading troll farms.

And the American remake of French show Le Bureau, retitled The Agency, changed one of its primary villains to the Russians. The John Krasinski-led version of Jack Ryan spent its third season fighting off a plot to reinstate the USSR.

Putin and the Russia he has moulded in the USSR days of old is an easy target in pop culture, there are few arguments that he isn’t one of the great villains of this century.

But by continuing to exploit the cultural binaries of the Cold War, the Americans also don’t have to look too hard at themselves.