"The Greatest Force America Has" - The Role of Hollywood Movies in Diplomacy with Russia
An Interview with Nina Khrushcheva
Nina Khrushcheva is professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York. She is an editor of and a contributor to the Project Syndicate: Association of Newspaper Around the World. Her articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and other international publications. She has commented widely on Russian politics for a variety of media outlets such as MSNBC, CNN and BBC. Khrushcheva is the author of several books, her latest (co-authored) is In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones. She is currently working on a biography of her great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, the former Premier of the Soviet Union. (He left office the year Nina was born.) Nina is his adoptive granddaughter because when Nikita Khrushchev's son Leonid died in World War II, Nikita adopted Leonid's two-year-old daughter, Julia, who later became Nina's mother.
Anthony Mohr: Thank you for talking with us. Let me start by asking what can the US government, and also people like myself, do regarding the war in Ukraine?
Nina Khrushcheva: Well, that's a very big question. I work on history and on propaganda. What I’m witnessing now, and what I've witnessed after almost 35 years of living in the US, is that when America decides to have an enemy, I don't think there is a conversation about policy. If the US decides to go after an enemy, it just does. Why are we even discussing a change of policy? Because the policy, it seems, is to make Putin and Russia, by default or not by default, suffer with him and basically eliminate the existence of Russia the way the Americans and NATO, or now even the European Union want. Of course, the US says it’s not the case, but the actions, and words, say otherwise. Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, said that we are at war against Russia. So if that's the objective, what kind of different policies are there? We can have that discussion, but it doesn't seem to be a discussion anybody would listen to. It doesn't at all mean that I approve of Putin, not at all. I'm just saying this is the reality that we are facing, and the rest of it is just rhetoric and propaganda.
Mohr: What would be your thoughts on countering Russian propaganda, and what are your thoughts on anything you would consider to be US propaganda?
Khrushcheva: American propaganda is infinitely more interesting because it’s soft propaganda. It produces a product that the consumer wants to buy. Soviet propaganda, and to some degree Russian propaganda, is hard propaganda. It hits you over the head with information, and if you as a consumer don’t want to buy it, they arrest you. In America, Russian propaganda is being countered just fine, because over at least the past fifteen years, whatever the Russian message is, American propaganda has been consistently presenting Russia as an inferior entity, an entity that cannot be trusted, as a bad guy, even before Putin was too obviously a bad guy. I teach Hollywood and propaganda, and I can give you all the movies that have been telling the world how horrible Russians are. There was The Golden Compass (2006) with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, where the evil forces all look like Rasputins and speak Russian without explaining it to the viewer. It's subliminal. Why, in Despicable Me (2010), is Steve Carell speaking with a Russian accent? There’s Salt (2010) where Angelina Jolie is an alleged Russian sleeper agent. We can go to 1997, with Boris Yeltsin, when US and Russia were friends. In that year’s Air Force One (1997), communist hijackers take over the plane. Everybody misses the Cold War, because war gives us meaning, even if it's a cold war. The anti-Russian sentiment has really never left, has never changed, regardless of government pronouncements.
And especially after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, it doesn't matter what the Russians say. Russian propaganda can’t compete because Hollywood is a global force. It's the greatest force America has. They’ve already told everybody what the Russians are, how not to believe them and how to fight them. I’m going to say it again, because it's important about contemporary Russia. You've countered Russian propaganda for decades. Of course, the Russians push their own narrative, but it’s incomparable in influence with the American message. Yes, it may be picked up by, say, Marine le Pen, or some right-wingers in Europe, and not because the Russians are saying it, but because they don't believe in a liberal agenda. These autocracies unite behind the formula, not behind Russia.
During the Cold War, of course there would be anti-Soviet films. But after 1991 America was looking for an enemy, waited for five years, and began producing anti-Russian films again. Then there was True Lies (1994) with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis and Art Malik, British of Indian descent, who plays an Arab terrorist. But these are politically incorrect. You need an enemy that nobody is going to ask you questions about. Hating a Russian is like riding a bike; you’ll never forget. It's how Putin was described, and he himself being an idiot, he walked into that Hollywood formula of a Soviet KGB enemy. That's how powerful American Hollywood propaganda is.
Mohr: Should something be done to try to portray Russia in a more sensitive light?
Khrushcheva: I don't think you can because Hollywood is a product created with certain types of political beliefs in mind. Also, everybody wants a bad guy, an enemy and who could be an easier bad guy than the Russians? It's both a political force and also a consumer product. You can't say I hate the Chinese. That would be racist. You can easily say, I hate the Russians, and, in fact, the whole world is saying, I hate the Russians, regardless of whether they support Putin or don’t. These market forces in ideology annoy Putin to no end. The Kremlin thinks that the White House orders Hollywood what to do, because that’s how the Kremlin operates. But Russia now also behaves like a Hollywood bad guy, so it itself perpetuates the image assigned to it. It becomes a perpetual circle. Russia says you're unfair in how you present us, and Hollywood or politics say, but you're behaving this way; how else are we going to present you?
Mohr: Is there any way Putin could be convinced that the White House is not telling Hollywood what to say?
Khrushcheva: It doesn't matter, because even if he can be convinced, his own experience with the White House is just that. For example, he meets with Joe Biden, who says we are going to have a predictable relationship, and Putin says, fine. Give us back some of our diplomatic properties in America, and then we actually can have some sort of diplomatic relationship and figure out how to move forward. To which the US says, well, we met with you because we want to keep you in your box. And Putin says, okay, I’m not going to stay in that box, because you can never be trusted with your overtures. The US says it wants something and then looks at its own interests, he thinks.
Take the 1991 collapse and the expansion of NATO. Russia’s concerns were not out of nowhere. But the US kept insisting, despite Bill Clinton’s smiles, that you're going to swallow everything because you're weak and insignificant after the Soviet Union dissolved. Russia has eleven time zones. It was not weak and insignificant. It used to be an empire. It used to be a superpower, so it was upset when treated this way, and that's exactly what’s caused tensions today. Russia doesn't want to be treated like any other country. This tension, I think, is basically existential. Putin with his war is off the rails and off everything. But Khrushchev experienced this, too. He thought he was negotiating with Eisenhower and Kennedy in good faith. And then it's, oh, no; we didn't mean it. We ultimately are the ones who run the world, and I think as long as America is going to be the one running the world and reminding everybody that it runs the world, Russia will continue to feel undermined. That’s Putin’s refrain: the world should pay attention to our issues. I am not defending Russia here. I'm explaining the dynamic.
Soviet diplomacy was an important part of the Cold War relationship. Instead of expelling diplomats – which was a huge mistake by Barack Obama, to punish diplomats for alleged meddling in the US election – they should have had some other punishment, but not with diplomats. Diplomacy is what kept the Cold War relationship going. Diplomats did their jobs with great professionalism. So, at this point I don't see how the relationship will change, because we’ve reached a stage where anything that is being done for Russia is seen as appeasement, a nod towards Putin. Even rational acts cannot be done, because everybody else is going to be up in arms. That's how escalation happens. But the Biden administration has kept pushing, telling Putin there's going to be horrible consequences. We'll put him on his knees, and he's going to blink. That’s madness. I don't know who advised the White House about that. In which universe would you defeat Russia militarily, for example? What I am advocating is diplomacy as it was practiced in the Cold War. It consisted of little steps. Russia and America are giant lands and act in giant ways. But diplomacy doesn't want giant moves. It wants little moves. And that has not been done. Putin made it worse when he went with that proposal to roll back the borders of NATO. Yet it takes two to tango if we are interested in a conversation. But at this point I think that all potential for the conversation is lost until we really enter a phase of the Ukraine war when not having a conversation would be detrimental to the future of the world.
Mohr: I remember the kitchen debate between Richard Nixon and your great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev. I don't know if you would call that a little move. But it was a very interesting event, which in its own way helped relations.
Khrushcheva: Nixon actually went to Siberia and visited a copper mine there, which was a good PR move. Khrushchev had his own PR; he took Nixon on a boat ride on the Moscow River, and people were swimming close to them, saying that communism is great. At the time US had Llewellyn Thompson as a diplomat. He was a genius. Then there was Jack F. Matlock Jr. as the US ambassador. He too was a genius. And he has lamented that America now has destroyed all this diplomatic work that had been done over seventy years.
Mohr: Do you think George Kennan's policy of containment was correct at the time?
Khrushcheva: Oh, absolutely. I worked with George Kennan. I was his last researcher. He showed me the documents that in 1997, he wrote to Strobe Talbott, saying how the Russians would react badly, and he was right. Containment was a remarkable thing, because it didn't cancel our relationship. It actually provided for that.
Mohr: Would the containment policy work today?
Khrushcheva: I don't know. If Putin had been given Crimea and a land bridge, he probably would have backed off. Containment could have worked. But the problem with this, with Putin, is that anybody from Poland or the Baltics would say, you can’t have that, because if Putin gets this, five years from now, he will say, what about Odesa? And so on, and so forth. I don't have an answer to this.
With Khrushchev, you could trust him. He just wanted parity. The whole thing about the Cuban missile crisis was his concern that America was in Turkey. So why should Russia not be in Cuba?
Mohr: When the United Nations was formed, to get Stalin on board, we gave Russia three seats in the General Assembly. I assume Russia could have picked any one of their republics, and guess which ones they picked? Byelorussian SSR (now Belarus) and Ukrainian SSR.
Khrushcheva: Of course, and that made perfect sense, because these three lands were central to the Soviets. In fact, Putin insists Ukraine was a republic created by the Soviets. That's why he is so angry about this, because before, they were MaloRussiya (Little Russia), part of the Empire. Suddenly after seventy-five years, they got not only a nationalist identity, but a national identity as a country. His thinking is that we, the Soviets, gave it to them. If you look at the Soviet leadership, starting with Stalin, a lot of the Politburo had connections to Ukraine. It was the most important republic after Russia.
Mohr: Let me switch to a different angle. I know you are knowledgeable about Russian literature and am wondering if people in US politics and the diplomatic corps became more familiar with Russian authors, would that provide a clue about how to deal with Russia?
Khrushcheva: Yes, perhaps. Actually, that was a major conversation between George Kennan and me. We talked about Russian literature a lot because he kept saying that we could learn a lot about Russia from their literature. By the way, Jack Matlock’s original degree was in literature. I think he wrote about Nikolai Leskov and then defended his thesis long after he retired from the diplomatic corps. The reason I was his research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study was because I studied literature. Both Matlock and Kennan wanted to know how the Russian literary mind works in terms of politics. But the thing about Russian literature is that it really doesn't have good answers for the outside world. It has good answers for Russia inside.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s Ben Sinister, there is a character, Paduk, who is essentially a double for Putin. In Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector, Putin is the fake Inspector General. Knowledge like that would have been helpful if people tried to analyze Putin's leadership before the war, and not only from the KGB perspective, but also from how that type of a leader was described many times over in Russian literature.
Mohr: If Anthony Blinken asked you to recommend a good Russian work, which would you recommend?
Khrushcheva: I would go for Gogol, probably Dead Souls, because you can never go wrong with that. I would read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, because everything about Russia is in it; it’s one of the best works of literature from the Soviet period. I would also recommend Ben Sinister, one of Nabokov’s best but most difficult, and thus unknown, novels.
Mohr: Let me ask you this from a personal standpoint. What was Nikita Khrushchev like? We in the West think he was blustery, allegedly taking off his shoe in the United Nations and pounding it on the desk. What was he really like?
Khrushcheva: I never experienced him when he was premier. I know he was blustery, but he never pounded his shoe on the desk of the United Nations. That's actually one of the great pieces of American propaganda. Once you have an enemy, then you have to make that enemy as horrible as you possibly can. He certainly was banging his fists, but he wasn't banging his shoe. The shoe was sitting on the desk for some obscure technical reasons. Some people said, if this shoe is sitting on the desk, you must be banging it. Once again, America is brilliant at propaganda, at selling the public the story they want, unlike Russia, who is just hitting you over the head with it.
I only remember Nikita Khrushchev as a grandfather. He was a lovely grandfather. He was very funny. He didn't put on airs. He didn't put on airs when he was in power, and he didn't put on airs afterward. But everybody else at home treated him either as very sick or very important. Yet his actions towards us, the grandchildren, to some degree also explain his personality as a politician. Here is one example. We had to go every weekend to his country house to temper his solitude. All the families and all the children and grandchildren had to go, and it was a horrible chore, because first of all children were immediately sent to do gardening, to pick up strawberries or tomatoes. One time at a dinner, all the relatives were there. Some brought friends, so there were probably about twenty people at the dinner. It was very boring, and I started slurping my noodles just because I wanted to bring attention to myself. My mother was going blue and white, because it was completely unacceptable; we had much better manners at home. I decided I'm not going to stop. And so, my grandfather said, “I’m going to slurp with you. And whoever is louder will win, okay? If I’m louder, you stop, and if you’re louder, we'll all do this – the whole table.” He slurped, and it was very loud, louder than me, and I stopped. No lectures from my mother could have made me stop, but he did. That kind of a politician he was, too – very good off the cuff, making others do what he wanted, in a sense manipulating their responses, but without hitting them over the head. But I’m comparing him to Putin, to the KGB, where every move is hitting others over the head. With my grandfather, there was a conversation, a political negotiation in many ways.
Mohr: Did you ever meet Leonid Brezhnev?
Khrushcheva: I met him once because I was walking to school with his grandniece – it was a privileged school, of course, and we lived in a very privileged neighborhood on Kutuzovsky Prospekt – and he was leaving the house. He tapped me on the cheek and said, “How are you doing, little girl?” I went white and almost bit his hand, because at home he was considered to be horrible – he dismissed Khrushchev in 1964.
Mohr: Before we go, is there anything you'd like to add – a policy recommendation for any American, for anybody at the Harvard ALI?
Khrushcheva: When the Ukraine war is over – and Russia is going to lose again, as it did with the Cold War – don’t jump on Russia’s dead body. That’s why I’ve mentioned Hollywood in 1997. If Russians are treated like defeated rubbish, they may for the first ten or twenty years say mea culpa. They may feel guilty at first and will try to adjust. But there will be a growing generation who will forget what is now and will only remember the humiliation. Then there will be another cycle of confrontation. So I do hope that that America will have more George Kennans who will be tough on policy, but respectful in other matters.
Mohr: We didn't jump on the dead bones of the Japanese or the Germans.
Khrushcheva: Yes, exactly. Ukraine has already canceled Russian, canceled Pushkin, canceled everything. It's a mistake, but I get it. Still, it is part of their history. So what are they canceling? They are basically canceling themselves in many ways. After World War II, nobody canceled Goethe; nobody canceled the German language. So what's going on is really quite remarkable, and that's what I mean by the strength of Hollywood. It didn't happen just last year. It happened after the Cold War, when America was to some degree lost in itself, because the only enemy left was Fidel Castro, and that really didn't cut it. The bad Russians may have been a product for entertainment at the beginning but then it came out alive, an anti-Russian policy on the American side, a despicable behavior on the Russian side. I do hope the next time Russia loses – and Russia will lose – coming out of that loss will not be as humiliating and deleting of all things Russian.
Mohr: Nina, Thank you so much. I've really appreciated this fascinating session with you.
About the Author:
Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.