For decades, Hollywood saw red. From the 1950s, when Boris Badenov menaced Rocky and Bullwinkle, to the late 1980s, when a different Rocky defeated Ivan Drago, the Soviet Union provided the most memorable movie villains—ideal foes in a world shaped by the Cold War, and in a movie industry where every hero needed a sneering bad guy. When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Hollywood finally began looking elsewhere for its stock villains—but they’re making an impressive comeback this summer, with Soviet bad guys popping up everywhere from Netflix’s GLOW to the splashy Charlize Theron action movie Atomic Blonde.

The return of Soviet baddies at a time when Russia is in daily political headlines may seem obvious—but like a matryoshka doll, it’s more complex than it appears.

Big-screen villains that resemble America’s real-world enemies are as old as the movies themselves. German mad scientists and soldiers dominated films from the late 1920s; Nazis have been frequent antagonists in movies from the 1930s to this day. It’s no surprise, then, that at the height of the Cold War, everyone from Rambo to Patrick Swayze faced adversaries who hailed from behind the Iron Curtain. These sorts of villains are constant reminders of real-world geopolitics, an easy way to create tension and provoke an emotional reaction without spending too much time on tedious world-building.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet villain era, the Gulf War and 9/11 inspired a continual still-dismaying trend of one-dimensional Middle Eastern villains in everything from war films to superhero franchises. Russian wrongdoers still made occasional appearances, though usually only as throwbacks in forgettable fare like Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Child 44, and Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Some post-Cold War projects have even dared to invite sympathy for characters who once would have been presented as typical Russian boogeymen: see FX’s TV series The Americans, which follows two Russian spies posing as a married American couple in Reagan-era suburban D.C. Though beloved by critics, the show has never gotten great ratings—perhaps because a generation raised on Soviet no-goodniks has found it difficult to identify with the spies next door.

But this summer, the Soviets are back to being 100 percent bad. GLOW, the Netflix period dramedy about the cheesy 1980s TV show Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, sees protagonist Alison Brie elect to play a Russian villain in the ring—Ushanka and all. Atomic Blonde casts Theron as a tough-as-nails British spy on an impossible mission to find the double-crossers who keep killing her fellow agents in 1989 Berlin. And reports indicate that Wonder Woman 2, set for release on Christmas in two years’ time, will follow Diana Prince as she battles the Soviet Union just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.