Theme: Communism and the Cold War

This concerns depictions of Communism on screen. Communism is a development of Marxism that believes the state should mandate that all persons are economically equal and earning the same eliminating class divisions. This was a popular ideology that took over Russia in 1917 and spread to China, Cuba and many parts of Eastern Europe.

In almost all examples here, Communism refers to Soviet Communism, although there are some depictions of Chinese Communism. During the era of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was regarded as a great ideological threat to the freedom of the USA and other Western countries. This filtered through to genre cinema in many ways.

1950s genre cinema is filled with many examples of the fear of Communist infiltration, even scenarios where God and aliens step in to help overthrow the Soviet Union. Spy Films are rife with stories of East-West espionage.

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were a number of films concerned with the outbreak of nuclear war. Such fears extended well into the 1980s with right-wing fantasies about the Soviet overthrow of the USA.

Films of the Space Race Era tended to show cooperation between the two countries as being a necessity on the High Frontier of space although some of these also saw Cold War tensions as extending well into the future.

The Post-Soviet era features a number of spy films set in its aftermath or backdated to before the era. Of more recent there have been a number of Alternate History films set in and around the Cold War.

During this period, the Soviets also produced a number of genre films, mostly concerning the Space Race. These are listed under Soviet Cinema.