As a child during the Cold War, I remember a very pervasive stereotype in American pop culture of Soviet women being hefty, misshapen, wart-faced and totally hideous.
This 1980s Wendy’s TV commercial has a classic example of this.
Of course, almost 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, we all know that Russian women are gorgeous.
One wonders whether the stereotype of the hideous Russian prole woman was seeded into pop culture as a psychological operation, the same way that buzzwords like “conspiracy theory” were deliberately seeded by the CIA in 1966 to discourage speculation about the JFK assassination.
Recently, we’ve seen a revival of Russophobia, with DNC claims of “Russian hacking” of the US Presidential Election, to distract from Hillary’s approval of the sale of 20% of US plutonium to Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear agency. Maybe it’s to distract from John Podesta’s being on the Board of Directors of Joule Unlimited, which accepted a 1 billion ruble investment. As a lobbyist, Podesta personally received $170,000 to represent Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, in a campaign to end the Obama administration’s economic sanctions against that country.
