Some very specific recommendations?

[randomling]

So this is about to be followed up with some heavy-duty Googling, but I thought I would ask my lovely dwroll as well.

I'm looking for media that meet the following criteria:

* Fictional media written in the West (preferably the USA, but I'll also take Western European and Canadian stuff) that deals with or portrays the USSR (and to a lesser extent the rest of the Eastern Bloc) during the Cold War. Contemporary stuff is preferred over historical or retrospective stuff, as most of what I'm interested in is attitudes back then, but I'm also interested in modern-day representations of what happened back then.
* Fictional media written in the West about Communism and Communist governments more generally.
* Articles on the Western perception of the USSR/Eastern Bloc and Communism during the Cold War. Scholarly, journalistic and just-a-person-thinking-about-it articles are all welcome here, but please bear in mind that I'm not attached to a university and don't have easy journal access.

Yes, so I might be thinking about writing an essay on how Night Vale is influenced by Western/capitalist ideas about Communist governments.

Comments

[randomling]

Things I've got without Googling:

* The Beatles: Back In The USSR (?)
* John le Carré - particularly The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Smiley's People, but also have a look at the rest of his work for more treatment of Communism
* George Orwell, obviously - especially 1984 and Animal Farm
* Robert Harris - didn't he write something set in a Communist Russia?

And now to Google.

[randomling]

Stuff from Google:

Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War; http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2539142?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102607263287
Western perceptions of Communism: http://prezi.com/e_unriye4rsn/western-perceptions-of-communism/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=prezi_landing_related_solr&utm_campaign=prezi_landing_related_author
Perceptions of Communism: http://digitalformations.covmedia.co.uk/?page_id=48
The Legacy and Memory of Communism: http://www.eurhistxx.de/spip.php%3Frubrique24.html
Communism on the World Stage: http://rationalrevolution.net/war/communism_on_the_world_stage.htm

[randomling]

The core of this to me:

1. Night Vale's relationship with government and government bodies. "Good government" versus "bad government", rule through fear.
2. Night Vale's relationship with law and law enforcement. Secret Police, the "vague yet menacing government agency", laws and edicts governing what you can think, know and remember.
3. Draconian and incomprehensible policies and edicts - expressed in Night Vale with ritual, sacrifice and mystery; c.f. Big Brother in 1984.

[kaberett]

Actually. I think East Germany's Stasi would be super-relevant to the Sheriff's Secret Police.

[randomling]

Yes possibly!

[randomling]

Also:

"Othering" and isolating characters by making them speak Russian. Compare to the othering and isolation of Communist Americans in the McCarthyist US.

Russian-speaking characters as idealised versions of their English-speaking counterparts? Does this relate to character deaths?

[kaberett]

Ich Fuehl Mich So Fifty-Fifty is a dreadful, dreadful novel about the fall of the Berlin Wall from the perspective of some East German teenagers. It is also available in truly appalling translation, and yes, I am commenting unhelpfully mostly for the sake of the awful translation. (It is SO BAD. It has done pretty much a literal word-for-word Uebersetzung with minimal sops to idiom and sentence structure. It kind of belongs to the same genre as The Core for me.)

[randomling]

That sounds really interesting, thank you!

[the_rck]

The only one I can think of is Comrade Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi. I read it in English, but I believe it was originally written in Italian. It's about an Italian village priest who coerces his village's Communist mayor into pretending that he is actually a Communist, too, and taking him along on a tour of the Soviet Union. Going by Amazon, it came out (at least in the US) in 1964.

[randomling]

That sounds like it's worth a look. Thanks!

[pinesandmaples]

Vaguely related but an interesting read: Prague: A Novel by Arthur Phillips.

[randomling]

Thank you, I'll take a look!

[hatman]

How serious do they need to be? Does, say, Spies Like Us count? Or the brief 50s run of Captain America: Commie Smasher!?

The Hunt For Red October?

Sorry. Probably not too helpful.

[randomling]

I think humorous stuff still counts - comedy still reflects what we think about the topics it covers. So all of these are worth a look, thank you.

[hatman]

"From Russia With Love." Fun fact: the real KGB included those films in their training, believing it would give them insight into what the West thought spying was. They even went so far as to make some Bond-style gadgets. Various ordinary objects with hidden spy devices. They have a few on display in the International Spy Museum in DC.

[ephemera]

I wish I had time to go spelunking on your behalf, but what I can do is offer to do journal acccess hunting if you can find good citations for articles you want?

[randomling]

Thank you very much, that's such a kind offer! ♥