№ 4 - 2010
Fyodorov A.V.
Images of the Cold War: Projection of the Confrontation Politics on the Screen

For many years in the Soviet period of its history, our country’s cinema was, as is demonstrated in the article, was regularly creating the screen image of hostile America and of hostile Western world as a whole, with their urban “yellow devil”, i.e. exultant spirit of greed, hatred, racism, militarism, corruption, depravity, humiliation of ordinary working people’s dignity, etc. Sometimes it was novels by classics of American critical realism that were used as the literary basis for this kind of cinematographic production. But more often exposing stories were made up just straight off. The main purpose was to bring home to the public the view of horrors and evils of the inevitably decaying West. On the other hand, in the West – exactly as opposed to the above – the image of hostile Russia was being drawn up, aggressive, armed to the teeth, but, as for all the rest, economically backward and totalitarian, with its cold expanse of snow, with its poor population, brutally suppressed by malicious and perfidious communists, bogged down in corruption and depravity. The main purpose was similar – to bring home to Western viewers the thought of horrors and evils of inevitably decaying Russia…