Russia, once a place of fascination, now spells discomfort

James Moore, The Independent

For Gen X-ers like myself, the Soviet Union was an object of fear but also fascination. The terms “Russia” and “Russians” were often used as convenient shorthand for the country and its people. We are all now painfully aware of how wrong that was.

But, back then, we knew so little about it. We knew next to nothing about the people, or how they lived. Most of us had never met a Soviet citizen, and most of us never expected to.

True, people occasionally visited the eastern bloc. My paternal grandparents were card-carrying communists (my grandfather was a steelworker) and had holidayed in Bulgaria, but my brother and I didn’t have much contact with them after our parents split up. The occasional defector made front page news, before disappearing into obscurity, usually under a false name. We heard about the snaking lines for consumer goods.

But there was very little information available that was unfiltered through the lens of propaganda.

Unfortunately, it was often left to popular culture to fill in the gaps. In the more jingoistic parts of it, the “Russkies” were the baddies when the Germans weren’t. Sometimes they were played by German actors, although when Sylvester Stallone saved us from communism in Rocky IV it was Sweden’s Dolph Lundgren who played Ivan Drago, all hissing sibilants when he introduced himself as “a boxer from the Soviet Union” with his comically sinister entourage behind him.Some of it played upon the fears of the “evil empire”. Some of it was clearly designed to help whip that up. At the extreme end was the movie Red Dawn and ABC’s soapy Amerika mini series about a Soviet occupied US, which aired just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There were also grim warnings of nuclear devastation, an ever present fear we lived with. I still remember watching the BBC’s brutally grim Threads, about a full-scale nuclear war and its impact on Sheffield, where I was born, and having the s**t scared out of me in the process. Maybe it could do with a re-run. Maybe it should be beamed into the Kremlin.

Sting once (ugh) wailed about hoping the “Russians love their children”, too. Ridiculous. Of course they do. Putin though, not so much. He’s busy killing young people.

There were plenty of more nuanced works, which recognised that the west was far from perfect. John Le Carre’s masterful spy fiction, and the various adaptations of it, are a case in point. Those who cared to look also knew about the west’s shameful propping up of dictators because they were “our guys”. We knew which side of the wall we wanted to be on, but we knew it wasn’t a clear cut case of goodies and baddies.

Lots of us who consumed this stuff wondered what it would be like to go there. Only a few people did that, on highly choreographed tours.Today, I wonder how my Gen Z children will come to view the place. There is no mystery anymore,  and there isn’t much room for nuance. Today, Russia – and it is now Russia – is once again inspiring discomfort while its leaders and their shills bathe in post-Soviet nostalgia. But also the deepest contempt. The country is inching its way towards becoming a prison camp again as its regime seeks to rival some of the worst of the 20th century.

In popular culture, its people have lately, and somewhat unfortunately, been portrayed as stereotypical mafia hoods for American heroes to beat up on, but also sometimes as colleagues on space missions or in disaster movies. The actors still aren’t necessarily from Russia.

But what will the future hold? More spy fiction? More of the Russian accent as code for “bad”? Probably. Hollywood is nothing if not predictable and there will be a market for this. Tough break for the English character actors who’ve earned a crust portraying aristocratic bad guys, I suppose. They’ll need to find dialogue coaches.