Red-scare-inducing Russian villains litter US programmes. As McMafia updates the trope for the modern world, we take a look at its forebears

In McMafia, James Norton is back on our screens as Alex, the effete London-raised son of a dirty-dealing Russian oligarch, who must go round the world attending to his mobster family’s business. An adaptation of Misha Glenny’s non-fiction survey of global organised crime, McMafia seems keen to avoid the obvious stereotypes. In fact, it protests too much, what with characters running around saying things like: “They think we are all gaaaangsturs.”

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Yet despite the cold war blowing over, and a brief interregnum in which everyone from Bond down scoured the globe for fresh villains (South African diamond smugglers? Mexican drug cartels?), the Russian baddie has remained a staple of our culture. The big-screen canon is solidly established – from Rosa Klebb’s stabby shoes in From Russia With Love to Ivan Drago’s pumpoid muscle in Rocky IV. But what about TV? Who are the small screen’s biggest Russian villains?

Viktor Petrov, House of Cards

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lars Mikkelsen as Viktor Petrov. Photograph: David Giesbrecht/Netflix

His initals are VP. He’s ex-KGB. Ex-Afghanistan. A strongman president with a glassy mid-distance gaze, Viktor Petrov is not the first faux-Putin to appear on our screens, but Lars Mikkelsen’s version also finds humanity amid the trope of the nihilistic Ruskie reptile. Petrov exhibits a strange pining after his ex-wife. He admits he secretly dislikes the anti-gay laws he passes, but “the Russian people are rooted in religion and tradition”. Realpolitik with a fatalistic shrug. Also famous for forcibly kissing Frank Underwood’s wife.

Ivan Koloff, WWE

Facebook Twitter Pinterest WWE wrestler Ivan Koloff. Photograph: MediaPunch/Rex/Shutterstock

Some date America’s 70s doldrums to Watergate. Others pinpoint that profound loss of national confidence to the moment that Ivan Koloff beat Bruno Sammartino to the WWF World Heavyweight Championship in January 1971. Now the Soviets were on top, even in Madison Square Garden spandex operas. The man who played Ivan was a Canadian wrestler called Oreal Perras. Perras would later recall that, if there were fans around, his WWF bosses required him to him stay in character even when he was off duty and hanging out with his family: a method acting marathon he found socially excruciating.



The cable guys, Seinfeld

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Seinfeld … the cable guys. Photograph: Sony Pictures

Ah, the fearsome face of the immigrant tradesman. Uncouth, incommunicative, permanently scowling. A dodgy dealer: the kind of dirty degenerate who could, say … get you a free cable hookup? Kramer sends the Russian duo into Jerry’s apartment just as Elaine is hosting a baby shower. The men eat all the food, fight with each other, monopolise the bathroom. Jerry decides that he doesn’t want Kramer’s illegal cable, and: “I’m not gonna pay for it. So what are you going to do?”. Cut to: a smashed TV. The moral is clear. He messed with Russians. You don’t mess with Russians.

Boris Badenov, The Adventures of Rocky and Bulwinkle

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The comic klutz baddie from American 1950s cartoon staple The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and one of the earliest instances of the mainstreaming of Russian evil. His name was a pun on the medieval Russian czar Boris Godunov. Technically, Badenov was working for the fictional Fearless Leader of the fictional nation of Pottsylvania, but from his borscht accent, from his lumpen party logic, it was always evident what was intended.

Red, Orange is the New Black

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate Mulgrew plays Red, left, with Alex (Laura Prepon) and Piper (Taylor Schilling).

Mother hen to the inmates, Galina “Red” Reznikov draws on all our stereotypes of the outwardly rock-hard yet secretly wise and kind babushka of lore. Red found her way into the slammer after punching, and bursting, the silicone breast implant of a local Russian mafia boss’s wife. Her penance involved storing five dead bodies in her freezer for them – a mistake. Red runs the Litchfied Penitentiary kitchen with a steady house-proud authority that makes her Season 5 arc of accidental drug-induced mania all the more amusing.

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Aleksandr Petrovsky, Sex and the City

A moody Russian who woos Carrie Bradshaw through the final season of Sex and the City, Petrovsky is a baddie of the worst kind – playing fast and loose with attractively coiffed midlife Manhattanites’ hearts. Even in the kitsch, wish-fulfilment world of SATC, nothing is more emetic than Mhis moves on Sarah Jessica Parker. He reads her Russian poetry. He plays classical piano pieces he’s made up. Truly, a one-man cure for the romantic in all of us. When he slaps her, she’s led straight back into the arms of Big.