If Russians didn’t exist, Hollywood would have to invent them. In a sense, Hollywood has. In English-language cinema, Russians aren’t so much a nationality as a set of tropes, sometimes resembling human beings but more often functioning as a kind of dark mirror for American and British protagonists. Russians are spies and hackers, soldiers and seductresses, terrorists and ideologues, dissidents and gangsters, and sometimes fully abstracted as nuclear mushroom clouds. The one thing they are not is ordinary people.

Those of us who study Russia, the country, are forever dogged by Russia, the pop cultural stereotype. If only we had chosen a country most Americans know nothing about, instead of a country most Americans know a few big things about, most of them gleaned from movies and TV shows. Since the Cold War, American audiences have fixated on the Russians, usually understanding them as villains but sometimes as antiheroes. Either way, Russians have typically been cast as cunning, intense, and fanatical, products of a society shrouded in darkness and tragedy, in contrast to the more straightforward and optimistic Americans.

That said, their role has shifted over time in sync with America’s anxieties about them. Over the past 50 years, cinematic portrayals of Russians have generally tracked with the perceived health of Russia and of its relationship with the West. Our popular perception of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia has transitioned over time from powerful adversary to fallen empire, and more recently to a revived and worthy foil.

The central question Americans seem incapable of resolving, either in our popular culture or our foreign policy, is whether Russia is strong or weak, and whether the threat it presents — that it presents a threat always goes without saying — is one of order or chaos.