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Stereotypes of Russians include actual or imagined characteristics of Russians used by people who view Russians as a single and homogeneous group.
These stereotypes in popular culture reflect increasing Russophobia. [1]
Russians are often characterized as being grim and stoic. While smiling is seen as an obligatory gesture of friendliness in Western countries, smiling at a stranger in Russia is regarded as insincere and is reserved for close friends. [2]
Vodka is Russia's national alcoholic drink, and the country leads the world in vodka consumption per capita, and so Russians are viewed as drinking vodka on a daily basis or in heavy doses. [3] Vodka has been blamed for 8,000 alcohol related deaths in Russia. [4]
The emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally Communist state has led to a lasting association of Communism with Russia, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation remains the second-largest political party in Russia. [5] Russians are often stereotyped as holding nostalgia for the Soviet Union; a 2018 poll showed that 66% of Russians regretted the fall of the Soviet Union. [6]
Russians are also stereotyped as addressing each other as "comrade" (Russian : товарищ, romanized: tovarisch). [7] The term has a long-lasting association with Communism after the Bolsheviks began using it to address those sympathetic to the revolution and the Soviet state. By the mid-1920s, the term had become commonplace in the Soviet Union, used indiscriminately similar to the words "Mister" and "Sir" in English. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the term has still been used as a standard term of address in the Russian Armed Forces and Police of Russia.
Many Russian authors, such as Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky have discussed the concept of the "mysterious Russian soul" in their writings. [8] [9] Winston Churchill famously described Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." [10] Russia's mysterious nature also stems from the fact that a large majority of Russia is uninhabited wilderness.
Since the times of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and later Russia are the traditional antagonists of the United States, which affects the stereotypes of Russians in American popular culture.
In Cold War spy fiction, Russian women are often depicted as beautiful, seductive, and deadly spies. [1]
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology that became the largest faction of the communist movement in the world in the years following the October Revolution. It was the predominant ideology of most communist governments throughout the 20th century. It was developed in Russia by Joseph Stalin and drew on elements of Bolshevism, Leninism, Marxism, and the works of Karl Kautsky. It was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, Soviet satellite states in the Eastern Bloc, and various countries in the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World during the Cold War, as well as the Communist International after Bolshevization.
Post-communism is the period of political and economic transformation or transition in post-Soviet states and other formerly communist states located in Central-Eastern Europe and parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in which new governments aimed to create free market-oriented capitalist economies. In 1989–1992, communist party governance collapsed in most communist party-governed states. After severe hardships communist parties retained control in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. SFR Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, which plunged the country into a long complex series of wars between ethnic groups and nation-states. Soviet-oriented communist movements collapsed in countries where they were not in control.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. During its existence, it was the largest country by area, extending across eleven time zones and sharing borders with twelve countries, and the third-most populous country. An overall successor to the Russian Empire, it was nominally organized as a federal union of national republics, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian SFSR. In practice, its government and economy were highly centralized. As a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was a flagship communist state. Its capital and largest city was Moscow.
Socialist realism is the official cultural doctrine of the Soviet Union that mandated an idealized representation of life under socialism in literature and the visual arts. The doctrine was first proclaimed by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 as approved method for Soviet cultural production in all media. In the aftermath of World War II, socialist realism was adopted by the communist states that were politically aligned with the Soviet Union. The primary official objective of socialist realism was "to depict reality in its revolutionary development" although no formal guidelines concerning style or subject matter were provided.
Vladimir Antonovich Ivashko was a Soviet Ukrainian politician, briefly acting as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the period from 24 to 29 August 1991. On 24 August Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from the post, and on 29 August the CPSU was suspended by the Supreme Soviet. Before becoming General Secretary he had been voted Gorbachev's Deputy General Secretary within the Party on 12 July 1990, a newly created position as a result of the 28th Congress of the Communist Party.
People's republic is an official title that is mostly used by current and former communist states, as well as other left-wing governments. It is mainly associated with soviet republics, socialist states following the doctrine of people's democracy, sovereign states with a democratic-republican constitution that usually mentions socialism, as well as some countries that do not fit into any of these categories.
In political contexts, comrade means a fellow party member, usually left-wing. The political use was inspired by the French Revolution, after which it grew into a form of address between socialists and workers. Since the Russian Revolution, popular culture in the West has often associated it with communism. As such, it can be used as a derogatory reference to left-wingers, akin to "commie". In particular, the Russian word товарищ may be used as derogatory reference to Communists.
Anti-Sovietism or anti-Soviet sentiment are activities that were actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union.
Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the politics and policies of the Soviet Union while Sovietology is the study of politics and policies of both the Soviet Union and former communist states more generally. These two terms were synonymous until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In an extended usage, Kremlinology is sometimes used to mean any attempt to understand a secretive organization or process, such as plans for upcoming products or events, by interpreting indirect clues.
Comrade X is a 1940 American comedy spy film directed by King Vidor and starring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr. The supporting cast features Oskar Homolka, Felix Bressart, Sig Rumann and Eve Arden. In February 2020, the film was shown at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, as part of a retrospective dedicated to King Vidor's career.
Petro Yukhymovych Shelest was a Ukrainian Soviet politician who served as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1965 until his removal in 1972. Ideologically a social moderate and a national communist, he oversaw a widespread liberalisation of Ukrainian society as part of the Khrushchev Thaw and Sixtier movement that led to increased visibility of the Ukrainian language and culture in public life. Shelest was removed by Leonid Brezhnev in 1972 and replaced with Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who undid much of Shelest's reforms and oversaw intensive Russification of Ukrainian society.
Russian political jokes are a part of Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods: Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. In the Soviet period political jokes were a form of social protest, mocking and criticising leaders, the system and its ideology, myths and rites. Quite a few political themes can be found among other standard categories of Russian joke, most notably Rabinovich jokes and Radio Yerevan.
Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an antisemitic and anti-communist conspiracy theory that claims that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a Jewish plot and that Jews controlled the Soviet Union and international communist movements, often in furtherance of a plan to destroy Western civilization. It was one of the main Nazi beliefs that served as an ideological justification for the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.
National communism is a term describing various forms in which Marxism–Leninism and socialism has been adopted and/or implemented by leaders in different countries using aspects of nationalism or national identity to form a policy independent from communist internationalism. National communism has been used to describe movements and governments that have sought to form a distinctly unique variant of communism based upon distinct national characteristics and circumstances, rather than following policies set by other socialist states, such as the Soviet Union.
Russian studies is an interdisciplinary field crossing politics, history, culture, economics, and languages of Russia and its neighborhood, often grouped under Soviet and Communist studies. Russian studies should not be confused with the study of the Russian literature or linguistics, which is often a distinct department within universities.
Holy See–Soviet Union relations were marked by long-standing ideological disagreements between the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union. The Holy See attempted to enter in a pragmatic dialogue with Soviet leaders during the papacies of John XXIII and Paul VI. In the 1990s, Pope John Paul II's diplomatic policies were cited as one of the principal factors that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Antisemitism in Russia is expressed in acts of hostility against Jews in Russia and the promotion of antisemitic views in the Russian Federation. This article covers the events since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Previous time periods are covered in the articles Antisemitism in the Russian Empire and Antisemitism in the Soviet Union.
The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, usually known as Komsomol, was a political youth organization in the Soviet Union. It is sometimes described as the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), although it was officially independent and referred to as "the helper and the reserve of the CPSU".
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration № 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. It also brought an end to the Soviet Union's federal government and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide. The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. Annexation of at least 3 of them by Soviet Union during the World War II was never fully recognized. By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and Gorbachev continuing the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members, the Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian SSRs, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to dissolve the union.
The social phenomenon of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, can include sentimental attitudes towards its politics, its society, its culture and cultural artifacts, its superpower status, or simply its aesthetics.
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