Guest: Rósa Magnúsdóttir is an Associate Professor of History at Aarhus University in Denmark specializing in propaganda and US-Russian relations during the Cold War. She’s the author of Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 published by Oxford University Press. Music: Consolidated, “Friendly Fascism,” Friendly Fa$cism, 1991. If you like these transcripts and want to read more, then support them by becoming a patron of the SRB Podcast. This abridged version of the interview has been edited for clarity. Your book, Enemy Number One: The United States of America and Soviet Ideology and Propaganda 1945-1959, explores the Soviet view of America during the early years of the Cold War. To start, what was the Soviet view of the United States before 1945? That’s actually quite important because the view of the United States in the postwar Soviet Union relied to a great extent on earlier images of the United States. In the book, I review the images that we see from the late 19th century, starting with some of the literary accounts like from Vladimir Korolenko, and of course the big ones like from Maxim Gorky and Aleksandr Block. Many of them visited the United States, saw it, wrote travel logs that became classics in the Soviet Union. A lot of the later images relied to a great extent on these early literary accounts. Then, of course, we have political accounts. The Bolsheviks also looked to the United States as a positive model in terms of technological advancement and even prosperity. It’s quite well known they had a very positive view of Fordism or Taylorism. So, it was not all negative like it was in the postwar period. There was, of course, also a negative image—social and racial. The United States were criticized quite openly. But their overwhelming view for almost about 50 years, up until the Second World War, was that the United States was a technological model for the Soviet Union. The Second World War and the wartime alliance also had a great impact on the Soviet perception of the United States. The influence of Lend Lease, tanks, jeeps, trucks, guns, foods—a lot of people talked about Spam or American products that entered the Soviet Union during the Second World War. And popular culture was obviously very famous. This particular image, the war-time alliance, when the United States and the Soviet Union were co-operating for the greater good, ends up playing a big role in the later images of the United States. That’s one of the points that I make in the book: the importance of the war-time alliance and what role that plays in later views of the American enemy. The image of America in the Soviet Union turns more hostile after 1945. What was some of the elements of anti-Americanism in the final Stalin years? In the first chapter of the book, I go over the anti-American campaign. We all know about the anti-western and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign but there was also a very clear top down anti-American campaign from the top layers of the Soviet bureaucracy. And it emphasized how anti-Americanism should be present in all layers of society. We know the most about the media, so in the book I highlighted anti-Americanism in theater, films and literature. There we see some of the old classics being reused because they fit perfectly with the style and the anti-American Cold War agenda. New works were also designed to suit those purposes in the late Stalin era. It was really interesting to me how detailed the instructions were and also the ex...