December 09, 2017

Why We Love to Hate Russians


Why We Love to Hate Russians

In this week's roundup of interesting online reads, we find out how the election meddling campaign actually was aimed at something else, and consider why Russians are such enduring villains. 

Social Mania

New details continue to come to light in the Russian election meddling story. This week Bloomberg ran an interesting story detailing how IRA – the now infamous “troll farm” in St. Petersburg set up dozens of fake American news sites that had over half-a-million followers. And, the internet being what it was, those stories got shared and reshared and retweeted and reshared by over 100 real news outlets.

These accounts were some of the now 2752 Twitter counts that have since been suspended for their IRA ties. Many of them were micro-targeted at local communities.

They targeted a diverse set of regions across the political spectrum, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Several of the accounts were impersonating local news outlets in swing states, like @TodayPittsburgh, @TodayMiami and @TodayCincinnati.

The accounts were all over the map, from @BlackNewsOutlet an account focused on Black Lives Matter, to @tpartynews that was vehemently anti-Obama, to @Ten_GOP that was staunchly conservative and posed as a patriotic American. What they shared was a penchant for stirring the pot, roiling up readers with news both real and fake.

Researchers have concluded that many of the IRA-linked accounts were created to sow social discord, by trying to "put left-wing people further to the left and right-wing people further to the right," said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab. "It's that attempt to amplify the differences in society."

And then there were, Twitter estimates:

more than 36,000 Russian-linked accounts generated about 1.4 million automated, election-related Tweets.

But what is interesting is this:

Nimmo says these news imposter accounts may have been created for an operation that never happened. A U.S. intelligence report concluded that the Russian government was expecting Hillary Clinton to win the election and were prepared to call into question the validity of the results. Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP on election night in anticipation of her victory, according to the report. These news imposter accounts could have aided those efforts to undermine the election results by promoting certain hashtags and topics like “voter fraud” or “rigged election."  By having a network of local news accounts across the country, the Kremlin would be able to distribute propaganda at scale that could galvanize local populations to protest, according to Nimmo.

And the IRA was playing a long game. Most of the Twitter accounts were set up a year before the 2016 election.

Boris and Natasha

While the IRA/meddling news is certainly real, one can’t help wondering why it is that Americans seem to so love having a Russia arch enemy. In a gem of an article by Jessica Goldstein on ThinkProgress this past spring (well before all the election meddling came to light), the author explores why “We don’t really want to live in a world without Russian villains.”

From Rocky and Bullwinkle (1959) to the current The Americans (2013), Goldstein argues, “No villain has endured in our cinematic imagination quite like the Russian.” Nazis and terrorists have come and gone, but the Russians keep coming back...

The classic Russian villain, according to Robert Thompson of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, is:

Humorless, cold. Overly, ruthlessly logical. Robotic. A really thick accent. 

(Which, as any Russophile who has visited Russia will tell you, is not what your average Russian is like, except maybe for the accent. But it may be what certain members of Russian “security organs” are like...)

And, Thompson says, Hollywood has become a bit dependent on this villain:

“We’ve got this tradition of a certain type of storytelling,” and traditions are not so easily changed. To eliminate the Soviet enemy from our screens “would be like saying to a romantic comedy writer, ‘People can’t meet in a cute way anymore.’”

Nina Khrushcheva, the Soviet leader’s great-granddaughter and a professor, adds: “Russia is the basic reference of badness at all times.”

For The Americans’ co-executive producer Joel Fields, all of this is rooted in the fact that:

there’s really one country that we as Americans have felt existentially threatened by, and that’s the Russians.

Yet Khrushcheva feels that

Russia was a perfect enemy to have because it wasn’t really scary like the Chinese, which is not only politically incorrect but because of American debt, and it’s a rising power that could replace the United States in leadership, and it’s a scary notion. And there’s a whole Islamic fundamentalist or [Middle Eastern terrorist], however people want to portray it, it is also scary, and it’s politically incorrect as well.

In agreement, Thompson points out that there is a certain racial reality about Russian villains and Hollywood: Russians are white.

You can give juicy antagonist roles to the same old actors that are out there and you don’t have to break any of those kinds of [casting] traditions... There are probably a lot of socially conscious people out there who would be more comfortable making a movie with white actor bad guys as Russians than they would be making yet another movie where the bad guys are terrorists and brown people are starring in it.

Joe Weisberg, the other producer of The Americans, agrees:

I think [the Russian villain] has endured in part because Americans are able to use Russian enemy stereotypes without fearing that they’re treading into racist territory

And, as Khrushcheva adds:

In defense of Hollywood, Russians are also easy to portray as villains. It’s not like their behavior is helping much.

In the end, The Americans producers, Khrushcheva, and author Goldstein agree that the villains Hollywood created tell us perhaps more about ourselves than they do about Russians:

we invented the bad we needed to oppose in order to believe in our own inherent goodness...

Why do Americans so consistently imagine Russian villains as uptight, militant, leg-breaking thugs who follow orders without question? Probably because that’s the antithesis of what America likes to imagine its own heroes to be: Scrappy, jocular good guys, morally correct cowboys who occasionally break the rules but are so charming and suave while doing so you can’t begrudge their mischief. Americans believed our pop cultural Russian enemy into being to justify and maintain our fantasies about ourselves.

 

 

 

 

You Might Also Like

A Soviet Leader in the US? Preposterous!
  • September 15, 2014

A Soviet Leader in the US? Preposterous!

When you're a Soviet dictator, it's rare that you get the chance to tour the US, visiting movie sets, meat freezers, and steel mills, being featured on TV, and laughing at angry farmers. Nikita Khrushchev got that chance 55 years ago. And he made the most of it.
Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
Moscow and Muscovites

Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
Fearful Majesty

Fearful Majesty

This acclaimed biography of one of Russia’s most important and tyrannical rulers is not only a rich, readable biography, it is also surprisingly timely, revealing how many of the issues Russia faces today have their roots in Ivan’s reign.
Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.
Life Stories: Original Fiction By Russian Authors

Life Stories: Original Fiction By Russian Authors

The Life Stories collection is a nice introduction to contemporary Russian fiction: many of the 19 authors featured here have won major Russian literary prizes and/or become bestsellers. These are life-affirming stories of love, family, hope, rebirth, mystery and imagination, masterfully translated by some of the best Russian-English translators working today. The selections reassert the power of Russian literature to affect readers of all cultures in profound and lasting ways. Best of all, 100% of the profits from the sale of this book are going to benefit Russian hospice—not-for-profit care for fellow human beings who are nearing the end of their own life stories.
93 Untranslatable Russian Words

93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
Okudzhava Bilingual

Okudzhava Bilingual

Poems, songs and autobiographical sketches by Bulat Okudzhava, the king of the Russian bards. 
Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
Jews in Service to the Tsar

Jews in Service to the Tsar

Benjamin Disraeli advised, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” With Jews in Service to the Tsar, Lev Berdnikov offers us 28 biographies spanning five centuries of Russian Jewish history, and each portrait opens a new window onto the history of Eastern Europe’s Jews, illuminating dark corners and challenging widely-held conceptions about the role of Jews in Russian history.
At the Circus (bilingual)

At the Circus (bilingual)

This wonderful novella by Alexander Kuprin tells the story of the wrestler Arbuzov and his battle against a renowned American wrestler. Rich in detail and characterization, At the Circus brims with excitement and life. You can smell the sawdust in the big top, see the vivid and colorful characters, sense the tension build as Arbuzov readies to face off against the American.
The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The fables of Ivan Krylov are rich fonts of Russian cultural wisdom and experience – reading and understanding them is vital to grasping the Russian worldview. This new edition of 62 of Krylov’s tales presents them side-by-side in English and Russian. The wonderfully lyrical translations by Lydia Razran Stone are accompanied by original, whimsical color illustrations by Katya Korobkina.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955