Oh I wasn't trying to contradict your thesis or anything. "Miss Mend" is even odder because as you say it is pre-Cold War when the United States and Soviet Union pretty much had nothing to do with each other. The English would have been more logical villains, what with Churchill's "strangling Bolshevism in its…

And the tragic thing about Afghanistan was that many people in the Soviet leadership did grasp that it was a bad idea. They finally decided that ugh, they had to support a neighboring Marxist regime no matter what.

50-80 years? How long were the tsars in the Baltics? The Russians occupied those areas for centuries, minus a 1920-1940 interregnum for the Baltic states (which Belarus and Ukraine did not get).

The Communist Party was not a crime and we were not at war with the Soviet Union, ever. So how do we justify the Red Scare again?

Well, the Soviets had a lot of problems. World War I, the revolution, the Russian Civil War, Stalin and collective farms, and then of course Armageddon in the shape of World War II. They didn't have time to hate us, and as noted in the article above they had real live villains for their entertainment in the shape of…

The strangest thing to me is how Rocky beats a guy who's twice his size. At least in the first couple films they got Carl Weathers to play a guy who was almost as short of stature as Stallone was.

The BBC for all its flaws is a great and wonderful instution and y'all are lucky to have it. If only we'd done the same.

As you say yourself,

American villains:

"have decimated Al Qaeda's top leadership"

The Kotkin book is pretty dry. Like I said—actually he says it in his intro, describes his own book as a history of the Soviet Union from Stalin's desk. So Stalin's shitty relationship with his own son is barely touched upon, while there's a whole chapter about Mongolia becoming a Soviet satellite state in the early…

I watched that show, and IIRC hardly anything happens other that the scene where the Soviets massacre Congress. Lots and lots of talking.

That fear was a very real fear that Stalin held. And to the end Hitler and his gang were hoping that the Western Allies would come over to his side and fight Stalin.

My favorite thing about the first BTTF is how the movie just completely forgets about the homicidally angry Libyans. They hit a photo kiosk, their van tips over—and that's it for the Libyans, nobody remembers the murderous terrorists a few feet away when Marty zips back to 1985 and finds a not-dead Doc.

Henry Wallace was not a Soviet agent, and was out of government office after 1945. And Alger Hiss was not in the Cabinet but was a pretty minor government bureaucrat.

Joseph Stalin's collectivization did not take too kindly to the nomadic peoples of eastern Siberia.

1970s "Keep America Beautiful" PSA with the Crying Indian

Fox News, the media arm of the Republican Party, looks pretty professional.

I read the new biography of Stalin by Stephen Kotkin—which really isn't a bio of Stalin so much as it's a history of Russia from his POV, but anyway—and one interesting point he made was that the creation of the "Soviet Union" was Lenin's idea. Nicholas II had ruled Belarus and the Baltics and Ukraine along with the…

I distinctly remember reading a National Geographic article from the 1980s about the Berlin Wall that explained how Germany would never reunify because the two sides had grown too far apart.