Rocky IV
Mission to Moscow
Dr Strangelove, (right) From Russia with Love
JULY 4, 2015.
In Washington, DC, it is Independence Day. In Moscow, it is movie night. At a sprawling estate outside the Russian capital, a former KGB spy hosts a Vietnam War veteran. The setting is Novo-Ogaryovo, the Russian president’s suburban residence―for the ex-spy is none other than Vladimir Putin, and his guest is acclaimed director Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street).
Together, they settle in to watch Dr Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s seminal Cold War satire. This moment, almost surreal, is captured in The Putin Interviews, Stone’s four-part TV series released in 2017. Towards the end of the series, based on two years of conversations, Stone prods Putin with a blunt question: “In a hot war, is the US dominant? Yes or no?”
“Nyet,” Putin replies.
“So, it would be a case of Russia surviving?” Stone asks.
“I think no one,” Putin says, “would survive such a conflict.”
As Dr Strangelove plays, Stone eagerly watches Putin’s reactions during key moments, as if wanting him to like it. The movie ends with its chilling montage of nuclear annihilation―the military doctrine of mutually assured destruction (has there ever been a more fitting acronym?) realised in fire and fallout. The room falls silent.
Afterwards, Putin delivers what is his only recorded film review. “There are certain things in this film that indeed make us think,” he says, “despite the fact that everything you see onscreen is make-believe. The director foresaw some issues, even from a technical point of view―things that make us think about real threats that exist.”
American critics were less reflective about The Putin Interviews. Some praised Stone’s earnest attempt to explore Russia’s vast political and cultural landscape through its most powerful leader since Stalin. But most lambasted his approach as disturbingly empathetic and uncritical. “Putin has a lot to say,” noted Newsday. “Stone lets him say it.” The Daily Beast went further, calling the series a “wildly irresponsible love letter” that sought to “humanise” Putin.
Eyeing the enemy: From The Putin Interviews.
Hollywood, after all, has rarely been in the business of humanising Russians.
From the Cold War onward, Soviet villains were a staple: ruthless, ideologically rigid, and always plotting against the “free world”. Even From Russia With Love (1963) had James Bond thwarting evil Soviet agents―though not before one of them left his romantic skills shaken and stirred.
But Hollywood’s portrayal of Russians was not always hostile. During World War II, when the USSR was an American ally, pro-Soviet films flourished. Mission to Moscow (1943), based on the memoirs of a US ambassador to the Soviet Union, was produced at president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s request to foster goodwill. The North Star, released the same year, celebrated Soviet farmers resisting Nazi invaders, while Song of Russia (1944) spun a romance between an American orchestra conductor and a Russian pianist―only for the German invasion to threaten their love.
Then the war ended, and the Iron Curtain fell.
A message from Moscow helped Hollywood find a new narrative. In 1946, American diplomat George Kennan sent an 8,000-word telegram―which came to be known as the “Long Telegram”―from Moscow warning that the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin had a “neurotic view of world affairs”, and that it saw US influence as their greatest threat. His conclusion: the US must adopt a strategy of “long-term, patient but firm, and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
A Soviet veteran-turned-Kazakh terrorist fights the US president in Air Force One.
Hollywood got the message.
Within two years, The Iron Curtain (1948) dramatised Russian espionage in Canada―publicity material breathlessly called it “the most amazing plot in 3,300 years of recorded espionage”. The Hoaxsters (1952), a documentary warning of communist infiltrators threatening the American way of life, (“The inside story of the world’s greatest fraud!”) won an Oscar despite its propagandist slant.
The 1950s, marked by anti-communist hysteria fanned by politicians like senator Joseph McCarthy, saw suspected communists blacklisted from Hollywood. In response, studios churned out anti-Soviet thrillers like Ice Station Zebra (1968), in which US Marines fight Soviet paratroopers over a downed satellite. At the same time, the growing fear of nuclear war inspired cautionary tales like Fail Safe (1964), where a disastrous miscommunication sends US bomber jets to attack Moscow―forcing the American president to face the moral dilemma of whether to give orders to shoot down his own aircraft. (“If we can’t convince the Russians that it’s an accident that we are trying to correct by any means, we are going to have something on our hands that nobody bargained for, and only a lunatic wants!”)
The 1970s brought a temporary lull in Cold War filmmaking, because of the detente between Washington and Moscow. But the business of Soviet-bashing came roaring back in the eighties. Red Dawn (1984) imagined a Soviet invasion of mainland US, thwarted by a band of high school athletes-turned-guerrilla fighters (“Members of an elite paramilitary organisation: Eagle Scouts!” quips the Russian villain.) Rocky IV (1985) pitted Sylvester Stallone against a steroid-enhanced Soviet boxer who nearly kills him―twice. The same year had Rambo: First Blood Part II, in which Stallone was tortured by a Soviet commander in a Vietnamese prison. Meanwhile, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s team in Predator (1987) went to South American jungles to uncover a Soviet-backed guerrilla camp and wipe it out accordingly.
No villain, no hero: In John Wick, Keanu Reeves plays a deadly assassin, born Jardani Jovonovich in the Soviet Union.
Soviet villains were so entrenched in pop culture that when actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev to Washington in 1987, he invoked a Hollywood-style fantasy: “Confronted with a hostile threat from another planet, our differences would disappear, and we would be totally united.”
By the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union weakened, Hollywood took a softer approach. Red Heat (1988) had Schwarzenegger playing Ivan Danko, a Soviet cop teaming up with a Chicago detective to catch a Georgian druglord. “Very strange city,” says Ivan about Chicago. “The crime is organised; the police is not.” When the Chicago police chief asks how Soviet cops handle stress, Ivan replies: “Vodka.”
With the Cold War’s end in the 1990s, Hollywood searched for new villains. True Lies (1994) shifted the threat to Islamist terrorists, but Soviet-era antagonists endured. Air Force One (1997) had Harrison Ford’s US president physically fight Egor Kurshunov, an ultranationalist Soviet veteran-turned-Kazakh terrorist. In the film’s mid-air climax, Ford breaks Egor’s neck and pushes him out of the plane, but not before telling him, “Get off my plane!” And ergo, Egor exits.
Even the most innovative directors have stuck to the formula. In Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020), a secret agent travels through time, bending the laws of nature to prevent World War III. But for all its visual and storytelling wizardry, Tenet finds its villain in a Russian oligarch from a Soviet-era secret city, exposed to nuclear radiation that somehow gives him clairvoyance.
Kennan, whose Long Telegram first shaped Cold War policy, later became a critic of Washington’s continued hostility towards Moscow. Promoting dialogue, he warned that foreign policy was not a battle of good versus evil. “To condemn negotiations as appeasement,” he said, “was to end a Hollywood movie with a villain shot.”
Hollywood may be listening―belatedly. Some recent films have gone beyond Cold War tropes. The John Wick series (2014-) gave Keanu Reeves the persona of Baba Yaga, a figure from Russian folklore. Reeves’s assassin is not quite a hero, and not exactly a villain. This year, the Oscar-winning Anora, a love story between a New York stripper and the son of a Russian oligarch, drew praise for its nuanced portrayal of Russian characters, featuring authentic dialogue and themes that resonated both in the west and an increasingly nationalistic Russia.
But will things really change?
This February, President Donald Trump made his first phone call to Putin since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine―an event that reshaped global politics and revived Cold War tensions. Trump and Putin spoke for around 90 minutes, roughly the runtime of Dr Strangelove. Could this movie-length call signal a shift in Hollywood’s portrayal of Russia?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps not. In The Putin Interviews, after watching Dr Strangelove, Putin rises to leave. Stone hands him the film case, and Putin walks off―only to return moments later, holding the empty case. The disc, apparently, is still in the player.
With a smirk, Putin raises the empty case: “Typical American gift.”