Soviet Spy Cinema of the early Cold War in Context of the Soviet Cultural Politics

Abstract

The article is devoted to analyses of the Soviet cultural consciousness during the Cold War, which was refected in the genre of spy cinema and literature. It was argued that the spy movie (along with the flm noir and nuclear fantasies) was one of the most representative genre of the Cold War, because it refected the basic cultural notions of that epoch, the public fears and the media clichés. There were investigated how the images of the Soviet spies and the secret agents were transforming in the Soviet cinema. It was concluded that the Soviet cinema during the Cold War focused not on the nuclear fears, but on the genre of the spy and military detectives because they were more representative for the notions of the Soviet society about the confrontation between the Soviet and the Western societies. Other principal conclusion is that Soviet spyware detectives were the metaphorical representation of the Soviet intellectuals’ opinion about the nature of the Soviet authorities.