Cold War Fiction

The Cold War was reflected in culture through music, movies, books, television, and other media, as well as sports, social beliefs, and behavior. Major elements of the Cold War included the presumed threat of a nuclear war, annihilation, and espionage. Many works use the Cold War as a backdrop or directly take part in a fictional conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The period 1953–62 saw Cold War themes becoming mainstream as a public preoccupation. For the historical context in the US, see United States in the 1950s.

Fiction: spy stories

Cloak and dagger stories became part of the popular culture of the Cold War in both East and West, with innumerable novels and movies that showed how polarized and dangerous the world was. Soviet audiences were thrilled by spy stories showing how their KGB agents protected the motherland by foiling dirty work by the United States' nefarious Central Intelligence Agency, Britain's devious MI6, and Israel's devilish Mossad. After 1963, Hollywood increasingly depicted the CIA as clowns (as in the comedy TV series ''Get Smart'') or villains (as in Oliver Stone's 1992 film ''JFK''). Ian Fleming's infamous spy novels about the MI6 agent James Bond also referenced elements of the Cold War when being adapted into films. One example of this includes the first Bond film, Dr. No, which was released in 1962 and used the Cuban Missile Crisis as a plot base. However, Cuba was substituted for Jamaica in the film.

Books and other works

* '' Atomsk'' by Paul Linebarger, published in 1949, is the first espionage novel of the Cold War.
* ''Alas, Babylon'' by Pat Frank
* '' Arc Light'' by Eric L. Harry
* ''Berts vidare betraktelser'' – Anders Jacobsson and Sören Olsson (1990), features Bert traveling with his family to New York City in July 1989, but fearing United States agents arriving to Öreskoga to prevent him from going to the US, as he has fallen in love with Paulina, whose cousin Pavel arrived to Sweden from Czechoslovakia (under Communist rule), and Bert has been talking to Pavel.
* ''Cat's Cradle'' by Kurt Vonnegut
* ''The Dispossessed'' by Ursula Le Guin is a science fiction novel exploring the differences in culture and philosophy between several alien societies, including that of an anarcho-syndicalist planet where most of the novel is set.
* '' Red Alert'' by Peter George
* '' Resurrection Day'' by Brendan DuBois
* ''Twilight 2000'', role-playing game.
* ''Warday'' by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka'' a 1986 novel by Tom Clancy, about a conventional NATO/Warsaw Pact war.
** Other Tom Clancy novels which are part of the Jack Ryan universe, most especially ''The Hunt for Red October'' and ''The Cardinal of the Kremlin'', though all of his books from this era are featured against a background of east–west conflict. Later ''Red Rabbit'' narrates a "What-If" scenario of the Soviets being behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the Pope.
* ''1984'' by George Orwell
* Frederick Forsyth's spy novels sold in the hundreds of thousands. '' The Fourth Protocol'', whose title refers to a series of conventions that, if broken, will lead to nuclear war and that are now, of course, all broken except for the fourth and last thread, was made into a major film starring British actor Michael Caine.
* ''The Manchurian Candidate'', by Richard Condon, took a different approach and portrayed a Communist conspiracy against the US acting not through leftists or pacifists but through a thinly veiled allusion to Joseph McCarthy. The logic of this was that if McCarthyists were accusing so many people of being communist agents, it could only be to divert attention from the real communists. The theme of collusion between international communists and Western rightists would be picked up again by many movies ('' Goldfinger'', ''A View to a Kill'') or television shows (episodes of ''MacGyver'' or ''Airwolf''), which would feature an alliance between power-hungry communists attacking the free world from the outside and profit-driven capitalists undermining it for financial gain.
* ''Glasnost'' radically changed Russian culture, as books that had been forbidden suddenly became available, and people were reading them all the time, everywhere.
* ''The Ugly American'' by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. Originally published in 1958, this book tells the story of how the US government handled foreign policy very poorly. The main character, Homer Atkins, discovers this sad truth when he is dispatched to the fictitious country of Sarkhan (in Southeast Asia.)
* ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This acclaimed book, first published in 1962, exposed the horrors of the Russian prison camps during WWII under the Stalinist regime. It is a semi-autobiographical tale about a dutiful soldier who is sent to a Siberian camp, after being falsely accused of treason. Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in literature.
*Twilight Struggle is a 2005 card-based board game by GMT Games that depicts the events of the entire Cold War, starting from Joseph Stalin to Ronald Reagan. The game was turned into a video game in 2016.

Cinema

Cinema as early Cold War propaganda

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each invested heavily in propaganda designed to sway both domestic and foreign opinion in the respective country's favor, especially using motion pictures. The quality gap between American and Soviet film gave the Americans a distinct advantage over the Soviet Union; the United States was readily prepared to utilize their cinematic superiority as a way to effectively impact the public opinion in a way the Soviet Union could not. Americans hoped that achievements in cinema would compensate for America's failure to keep up with Soviet development of nuclear weapons and advancements in space technology. The use of film as an effective form of widespread propaganda transformed cinema into another Cold War battlefront alongside the arms race and Space Race. Films from both the United States and Soviet Union can be seen as artifacts of propaganda as well as resistance.

US cinema

The Americans took advantage of their pre-existing cinematic advantage over the Soviet Union, using movies as another way to create the Communist enemy. In the early years of the Cold War (between 1948 and 1953), seventy explicitly anti-communist films were released. American films incorporated a wide scale of Cold War themes and issues into all genres of film, which gave American motion pictures a particular lead over Soviet film. Despite the audiences' lack of zeal for Anti-Communist/Cold War related cinema, the films produced evidently did serve as successful propaganda in both the United States and the Soviet Union. The films released during this time received a response from the Soviet Union, which subsequently released its own array of films to combat the depiction of the Communist threat.

Several organizations played a key role in ensuring that Hollywood acted in the national best interest of the US, like the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Production Code Administration, which acted as two conservative groups that controlled a great deal of the national repertoire during the early stages of the Cold War. These groups filtered out politically subversive or morally questionable movies. More blatantly illustrating the shift from cinema as an art form to cinema as a form of strategic weapon, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals ensured that filmmakers adequately expressed their patriotism. Beyond these cinema-specific efforts, the FBI played a surprisingly large role in the production of movies, instituting a triangular-shaped film strategy: FBI set up a surveillance operation in Hollywood, made efforts to pinpoint and blacklist Communists, secretly laundered intelligence through HUAC, and further helped in producing movies that "fostered he FBIimage as the protector of the American people." The FBI additionally endorsed films, including Oscar winner ''The Hoaxters''.

In the 1960s, Hollywood began using spy films to create the enemy through film. Previously, the influence of the Cold War could be seen in many, if not all, genres of American film. By the 1960s, spy films were effectively a "weapon of confrontation between the two world systems." Both sides heightened paranoia and created a sense of constant unease in viewers through the increased production of spy films. Film depicted the enemy in a way that caused both sides to increase general suspicion of foreign and domestic threat.

Soviet cinema

Between 1946 and 1954, the Soviet Union mimicked the US adoption of cinema as a weapon. The Central United Film Studios and the Committee on Cinema Affairs were committed to the Cold War battle. Under Stalin's rule, movies could only be made within strict confines. Cinema and government were, as it stood, inextricably linked. Many films were banned for being insufficiently patriotic. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union produced a plethora of movies with the aim to blatantly function as negative propaganda.

In the same fashion as the United States, the Soviets were eager to depict their enemy in the most unflattering light possible. Between 1946 and 1950, 45.6% of on-screen villains in Soviet films were either American or British. Films addressed non-Soviet themes that emerged in American film in an attempt to derail the criticism and paint the US as the enemy. Attacks made by the United States against the Soviet Union were simply used as material by Soviet filmmakers for their own attacks on the US. Soviet cinema during this time took its liberty with history: "Did the Red Army engage in the mass rapes of German women and pillage German art treasures, factories, and forests? In Soviet cinema, the opposite was true in ''he Meeting on the Elbe'." This demonstrated the heightened paranoia of the Soviet Union.

Despite efforts made to elevate the status of cinema, such as changing the Committee of Cinema Affairs to the Ministry of Cinematography, cinema did not seem to work as invigorating propaganda as was planned. Although the anti-American films were notably popular with audiences, the Ministry did not feel the message had reached the general public, perhaps due to the fact that the majority of moviegoers seeing the films produced were, perhaps, the Soviets most likely to admire American culture.

After Stalin's death, a Main Administration of Cinema Affairs replaced the Ministry, allowing the filmmakers more freedom due to the lack of direct government control. Many of the films released throughout the late 1950s and 1960s focused on spreading a positive image of Soviet life, intent to prove that Soviet life was indeed better than American life.

Russian science fiction emerged from a prolonged period of censorship in 1957, opened up by de-Stalinization and real Soviet achievements in the space race, typified by Ivan Efremov's galactic epic, ''Andromeda'' (1957). Official Communist science fiction transposed the laws of historical materialism to the future, scorning Western nihilistic writings and predicting a peaceful transition to universal communism. Scientocratic visions of the future nevertheless implicitly critiqued the bureaucratically developed socialism of the present. Dissident science fiction writers emerged, such as the Strugatski brothers, Boris and Arkadi, with their "social fantasies," problematizing the role of intervention in the historical process, or Stanislaw Lem's tongue-in-cheek exposures of man's cognitive limitations.

Films depicting nuclear war

* ''Duck and Cover,'' a 1951 educational movie explaining what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.
* ''Five,'' a 1951 film about five survivors, one woman and four men, of an atomic war that has wiped out the rest of the human race (while leaving all infrastructure intact). The five come together at a remote, isolated hillside house in Southern California, where they try to figure out how to survive while also being forced to face an unknown future.
* '' On the Beach'' (1959) depicted a gradually dying, post-apocalyptic world in Australia that remained after a nuclear Third World War.
* '' Ladybug Ladybug'' (1963) an elementary school nuclear bomb warning alarm sounds.
* '' Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'' (1964) – A black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War and the threat of nuclear warfare.
* ''Fail-Safe'' (1964) – A film based on a novel of the same name about an American bomber crew and nuclear tensions.
* ''The War Game'' (BBC, 1965; aired 1985) – Depicts the effects of a nuclear war in Britain following a conventional war that escalates to nuclear war.
* ''Damnation Alley'' (20th Century Fox, 1977) – Surprise ICBM attack launched on the United States, and the subsequent efforts of a small band of survivors from a missile silo in the Mojave Desert in California to reach another group of survivors in Albany, New York.
* ''The Children's Story'' (1982) short film, which originally aired on TV's Mobil Showcase, depicts the first day of indoctrination of an elementary school classroom by a new teacher, representing a totalitarian government that has taken over the United States. It is based on the 1960 short story of the same name by James Clavell.
* ''The Day After'' (1983) – This made-for-television-movie by ABC that depicts the consequences of a nuclear war in Lawrence, Kansas and the surrounding area.
* ''WarGames'' (1983) – About a young computer hacker who unknowingly hacks into a defense computer and risks starting a nuclear war.
* '' Testament'' (PBS, 1983) – Depicts the after-effects of a nuclear war in a small town, 100 miles north of San Francisco, California.
* ''Countdown to Looking Glass'' (HBO, 1984) – A film that presents a simulated news broadcast about a nuclear war.
* '' Threads'' (BBC
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