Bear, Bolshevik, buffoon, spy: The American tradition of fearing Russia

The Cold War is over, but Americans still hold on to stereotypes

After the Soviet Union fell, depictions of Russia’s nouveau-riche surfaced in the West as garish and eccentric stereotypes. (Robert Wallis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Donald Trump is comfortable with Vladimir Putin — too comfortable, it seems, for American tastes.

On the one hand, objections to the presidential candidate’s admiration for the Russian leader are understandable. Putin’s authoritarian tendencies are well-documented, and it’s incumbent on any leader to at least act appalled by his hunger for annexation and repression of dissent.

But when Americans react with horror to Trump’s Putin-friendliness, there’s something else going on, too. Americans are really, really freaked out by Russia. The Cold War is over, but Russophobia is still branded on the American psyche.

Even before the Cold War, Russia never really rubbed America the right way. The favored representation of Russia in 19th century political cartoons was the bear. Sometimes the bear was portrayed as a clumsy oaf who doesn’t know his own strength; other times, the bear was a menacing predator. Russia as inept, and Russia as savage: these two tropes continued to characterize American representations of Russia throughout the 20th century, and still do today.

19th century cartoons used the bear to characterize Russia as a ferocious oaf.

But when the Tsar was overthrown in 1917 and the Soviet Union was established a few years later, American fear of the Russians began to manifest in human form: namely, the Bolshevik agitator. Paranoia about Russian communists gripped the nation in what came to be known as the First Red Scare. In 1919 alone, anti-communist films included Bullin’ the Bullsheviki, Bolshevism on Trial and The Red Viper. That same year, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered the arrest of more than 4,000 alleged communists, many of them Russian immigrants (the Union of Russian Workers was raided in 12 American cities).

In the following years, a spate of films depicted in detail the horrors of Russian communism; for instance, Red Russia Revealed (1923) showed Lenin and Trotsky feasting lavishly while ordinary Russians starved. Russians in the American imagination were either poor, abject victims of Bolshevism abroad, or they were diabolical Bolshevik extremists intent on consolidating power and obliterating freedom and prosperity right here in America. The term “Russian reds” was as popular as “Islamic extremists” is now, and inspired a similar sense of revulsion and dread for many Americans.

1: ‘Red Menace’ chewing gum was a product of the times amid the McCarthyism of the Second Red Scare in 1951. (AFP/Getty Images) 2: Billed as ‘The Russian Bear’, Ivan Koloff was a prominent professional wrestling villain in the 1970s and 1980s, who also happened to be Canadian.

As intense as the First Red Scare was, it was brief and small-scale compared to the Second Red Scare, at the height of the Cold War. After World War II, the USSR had emerged as a formidable world power and adversary of the United States. Russia was strong and highly coordinated — coordinated enough, for instance, to develop atomic weaponry, spy on Americans, and race to outer space.

Thus the Bolshevik agitator of yore was replaced with the Russian spy as the dominant anti-Russian stereotype. Popular American culture throughout the mid-20th century portrayed Russians as sneaky and menacing. In the McCarthyist era — a time when even faint or alleged sympathies with communism could get you blacklisted for life, and convicted Russian spies were executed on American soil — Russia was synonymous with scheming, secrecy, espionage and intrigue. Cold War spy films produced a new round of Russian stock characters and stereotypes: the devious and clever double-agent, the heavy-lidded henchman, the unsmiling KGB officer, the sadistic mob boss, the lethal seductress, and so on.

Recent national magazine covers show how little has changed in media portrayals of Russia as a blundering menace.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the pendulum swung again from menacing to inept. As Russia began to emerge as a capitalist nation, it struggled to find its footing — and America laughed. Starting in the 1990s, a new group of Russian stereotypes emerged, including the heavy-drinking, hot-tempered Eastern cowboy (think the Russian astronaut in Armageddon bashing machinery with a wrench, exclaiming, “This is how we fix problems in the Russian space station!”), and the garish, tacky and eccentric Russian nouveau-riche. But Russian villainy never faded from view, even if it increasingly served as a punchline. In The New York Times, Steven Kurutz points out that action movie antagonists became more diverse in the final years of the Cold War, but seem to have actually become more uniformly Russian again in recent years.

The truth is, Americans are still uneasy with Russia; the stereotypes persist, and the mistrust lingers. A century of mutual animosity still sticks in the average American’s imagination. And geopolitical alliances change quicker and with more facility than the hearts and minds of the populace. So, through various ups and downs in U.S.-Russia relations, American citizens have remained leery of Russians.

News images made by American photojournalists, like this one of Muscovites waiting in line to eat at a newly opened McDonalds in 1990, relied on established views of Russia and Russians — in this case a militant police state with a complacent populace eager to embrace the West — refined over the preceding century. (Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Strongman politician Vladimir Putin has come to personify many of the modern stereotypes—and fears—that America still holds toward Russia. (AP Photo/RIA Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin)

Trump’s reverence for Putin is unbecoming, given Trump’s own inclination toward authoritarianism — but that’s not the only reason Americans are bristling. If it were, then Trump’s similar comments regarding Turkey’s Erdogan would’ve tripped the same alarm bells. We have a special attachment to Russians, a special fixation on their shortcomings ranging from aggression to incompetence. For Americans today, Russia is still the bear.