Russians Reprising Their Cold War Role as Enemies in Hollywood Films

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 1 – During the Cold War, Hollywood cast Russian KGB officers as the prime enemies of the West. Then, after 1991 and especially after September 11, 2001, the American movie industry reduced their prominence as it increased attention to Arab and Muslim terrorists.

            Now, Hollywood has given Russians again the prominence that they had lost; but now, the chief villains in American films are not KGB officers but rather organized criminal group leaders and oligarchs more generally, a Russian survey of the image of Russia in Hollywood says (sntat.ru/news/politics/01-08-2021/ot-russkih-k-arabam-i-obratno-kak-menyalis-zlodei-v-gollivudskih-filmah-5831694).

            “To say that Hollywood blindly fulfills the political orders of Washington and that the image of the enemy from Russians or Arabs is impermissible,” SNTAT says. “But it is obvious that producers, directors, and writers base themselves on the stereotypes of Americans” and those have evolved over the last several decades.

            In the course of its survey of films, the portal makes the point that the Russians never completely disappeared from the silver screen. But it says that the decline in the number of Russian “enemies” in films of the 1990s as compared to those of the Cold War opened the way for the return of Russian enemies of a different kind.

            What is striking but not mentioned by SNTAT is that today, compared to the Cold War period, Russian intelligence agencies are playing a bigger role in Russia’s dealing with the rest of the world than they ever did earlier; but Hollywood is now focused less on them than on the Russian oligarchs and the Russian mafia.

            Indeed, it is quite likely that the leaders of the FSB and of the KGB officers in the Kremlin are delighted by this development. They can point to Hollywood’s coverage as evidence of Russophobia, and they can only be pleased that Western movies are not focusing on the real threat the Russian intelligence agencies pose but on colorful but less significant “enemies.”