My mom teaches a course in Russian history at UIC, and at the start of every semester she asks her students to write down the first words that come to mind when they think of Russia. The most common answers include Siberia, vodka, bears, snow, and Stalin - stereotypes that date back to the Cold War and illustrate the orientalist image of Russia in American culture.
Throughout the 20th century, Soviet Russia has been the number-one “Other” to the US (and vice versa). In the true spirit of Orientalism, it was seen as savage, mysterious, and menacing. Some groups of the American society saw it as the empire of pure evil, some as a perfectly just and benevolent utopia, some simply as a distant and exotic fairyland. Though these approaches seem contradictory, they could easily coexist in the collective psyche, because all of them reduced Russia to an antipode of the Western world.
It’s interesting to see that this perception of Russia remains mostly the same today. The images of exotic Siberian landscapes and bears roaming the streets of Moscow still manage to coexist with the fear of superior technology and all-powerful hackers.
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