Back from the red – return of the Russian baddie

Four words of chilling Slavic intent were enough to cement the reputation of one of the iconic Russian villains: Ivan Drago, man-mountain adversary in Rocky IV. Whatever lip service Sylvester Stallone paid in the film to US-Russian detente was instantly undone by giving Dolph Lundgren’s Drago, one of the most hilariously 2D characterisations ever: Euclidean of flat-top, body seemingly carved from Urals granite and only occasionally polysyllabic (usually when threatening his opponent), he gives poor Apollo Creed the boxing equivalent of a month’s bombardment at Stalingrad: “If he dies, he dies.”

Drago followed in the line of big-screen Russian evildoers that kicked off in the cold war with From Russia with Love’s Rosa Klebb in 1963, only petering out in the late 90s with lazy reworkings of the Soviet bogeyman like Gary Oldman in Air Force One. Now, with Drago lining up a rematch for his son Viktor in Creed II, the time has never seemed riper for the return of the Russian baddie. With the Kremlin occupied by someone of true machiavellian stature, invading neighbouring countries, assassinating dissidents with arcane poisons, sapping the foundations of international democracy, Vladimir Putin has all boxes ticked on the malefactor’s charter. He has even begun to look a little like Dr Evil – twinkle of self-amusement included.

But it’s not as straightforward as it used to be. From Salt to The Death of Stalin, there has been a recent upsurge in Russia-themed subject matter, but the old-fashioned, gulag-vowelled Slavic baddie is surprisingly scarce and when they do appear they are low-key, largely non-political mafioso types, as in John Wick and The Equalizer. Rather, there’s a heightened curiosity in cinema about “Russianness”, the sources of the brazen cynicism and bald will to power that seem to be horse-whipping today’s global politics. Even Creed II, in line with Stallone’s new introspective mood for the Rocky franchise, looks like it may put the weight of history and recent Russian recalcitrance on its tale of fathers and son. Drago Jr has been “raised in hate” by his “damaged” dad, who is no longer a living constructivist monument, more the kind of guy who spends weekends coaching football ultras in a Moscow car park.

Maybe confronting the nature of modern Russia head-on is too much for the mainstream film industry, with the country one of the key emerging global film markets; the seventh biggest by tickets sold. One of the alleged reasons for Danny Boyle’s departure from Bond 25 was a disagreement over the portrayal of a rumoured Russian villain. Currently, Hollywood prefers the diplomatic route, exploring the Russian soul by trudging back to the depths of the cold war. The subject of last year’s The Death of Stalin was the totemic status enjoyed by the country’s leaders – from the tsars through to politburo chiefs and now Putin – and the extreme violence unleashed once they are off the scene; Armando Iannucci somehow alchemised this blood-soaked milieu into a knockabout English farce.

Taking its cue from the Anna Chapman scandal, Red Sparrow earlier this year put Jennifer Lawrence’s crocked ballerina through Sparrow school, the “sexpionage” training program from Soviet times (the film actually takes place in the 2010s, not that you’d know it from the moody Gorky park meets). Not only feeding fantasies about improbably slinky eastern operatives filching secrets, it also propagates the idea of icy Russian disdain for the individual. “Your body belongs to the state,” Charlotte Rampling’s Klebb-ish tutor barks at her. As Rampling demeans her pupils so they internalise the art of sexual exploitation all the better, she’s never short of a dehumanising bon mot: “Every human being is a puzzle – you must learn to intuit what is missing.”

Charlize Theron has similar Mata Hari-ish leanings, with added martial arts, in the 1980s Berlin-set Atomic Blonde. She’s nominally a British spook, but as she hunts for “Satchel”, a legendary KGB double agent who could be anyone, including her, all sides seem interchangeable. The field agents are disposable pawns in a head-spinning power game, and loyalty only seems to mean making sure you’re on the winning side. As Theron batters her way down the umpteenth Berlin staircase, this is realpolitik as MMA endurance bout.

The desire to step inside that world, these sang-froid dreams of total ruthlessness, say more about the west than about Russia: it’s a tacit admission that, like the old super-villain one-liner, we are not so different, you and I. Just as Putin can justify his manoeuvrings in the Ukraine and Syria by pointing to the self-interest at the heart of western actions with Nato and in the Middle East, the notion of flagrant Russian power in these films also reflects uncomfortable home truths back at us. The Death of Stalin focuses on the notion that politics is governed by power, not principle; Iannucci pointed to the current obsession with trying to criminalise political opponents as proof that the US and Stalinist Russia have more in common than either would admit. Atomic Blonde bludgeons its way to the notion that, whichever side you’re on, geopolitics is really a brutal scrapfest with a fig leaf of ideology. Red Sparrow isn’t just fur-coated erotica for Slavophiles: it plays shrewdly into the #MeToo climate, a barbed comment on a system of exploitation of female sexuality in which the individual is reduced to an object of consumption – starring someone who knew whereof she spoke.

On TV, The Americans revives good old-fashioned paranoia about the sleeper agent, prompted by Chapman and the illegals program, which was busted in 2010. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play two perfectly assimilated KGB operatives masquerading as Washington DC travel agents. With their Virginia suburban existence a front – two apple-pie kids included – the American dream is reduced to a kind of hollow performance, or at least one under continual review. The fantasy of this dormant threat points at the traumatic psychological schism opened up by the cold war. The early scenes of 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate – Frank Sinatra and his fellow troopers under hypnosis in a facility in communist China believing they are at a mumsy horticultural conference (“Fun with Hydrangeas”) – outstandingly capture this eerie dislocation; American purity adulterated by a foreign presence.

More than a simple security threat, sleeper agents burrow into the country’s unconscious. They expose, lampoon and undermine the American sense of self: the communist handler in The Manchurian Candidate goes to Macy’s on his day off. (It’s interesting how often these agents are female, as in Atomic Blonde, Salt and Manchurian Candidate’s Red Queen; the Russian project seems to be to sucker square-jawed US masculinity and, as Dr Strangelove puts it, sap the nation’s “precious bodily fluids”.) With the incestuous Republican mother in The Manchurian Candidate prepared to sacrifice her son to put her straw man in the White House, both the integrity of daily life and the highest American institutions are finally tainted.

You’d have thought this paranoia would have petered out with the cold war, but it’s getting stronger, in proportion to insecurity about waning American power and values. The sleeper-agent trope, from The Americans to Captain America: The Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has been surprisingly resilient. After Lee Harvey Oswald and his Soviet sojourn, The Manchurian Candidate’s relevance seemed to fade. Now it looks as if it may have actually come to pass. Everyone is on tenterhooks waiting for the Mueller investigation to rule on whether Trump colluded with the Kremlin in the 2016 elections, but the similarities with The Manchurian Candidate are stunning. The original novel – published in 1959 – was written in the wake of McCarthyism, but its central ideas remain piercing: how demagoguery and nationalism thin the fabric of the nation, and how centralising authority renders it more susceptible to takeover. “If John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent,” says the would-be president’s liberal opponent, “he couldn’t do the United States more harm than he’s doing now.”

As for Creed II, it’s probably best not to rely on Stallone, a man who once dedicated the Russkie-baiting Rambo III “to the brave mujahideen fighters”, for prescient geopolitical comment. One thing’s for sure: things were simpler when your arch-enemy was a 6ft 5in heavyweight in bright-red trunks promising to kill you.