In reality, very few Russians are sinister mobsters who poison their foes with polonium or dangle them from skyscraper balconies. But western TV and cinema are very different from reality. In the 21st century, their on-screen representations rarely break out of that sinisterly psychotic stereotype. When are TV Russians going to be the good guys? Never is the Guide’s guess. There’s too much popular cultural investment in depicting them as evil mobsters, as the implacably butch Other to relatively mimsy westerners.

In the centenary year of the Russian revolution, the west is still bewitched by this threat – specifically the mob, which seems bent on exporting its criminal values over here. And the fact that Russia is currently led by an ex-KGB demagogue who burnishes his masculinity issues by hunting half-naked and, according to the news media, may or may not have had a role in hacking the US presidential election, doesn’t help either.

Arguably, Russians are the go-to stereotypes in popular culture right now because, in western nightmares, that stock character resonates with the image we have from the news of President Putin as an implacable hoodlum bent on subverting democratic values.

Mob-handed … Maria Shukshina and James Norton in McMafia. Photograph: BBC/Cuba Pictures/Nick Wall

These kind of thoughts are preying on the minds of the makers of looming BBC drama series McMafia, starring James Norton, which is based on Misha Glenny’s book of the same name. In it, screenwriter Hossein Amini, along with writer-director James Watkins, has focused on a Russian criminal family whose new head is played by Norton.

Amini claims that what he has written avoids the otherwise ubiquitous Russian stereotypes. “The cliche is that they’re a bunch of goons in sharp suits,” Amini says. “What’s often missing from that is that they’re incredibly rich culturally; this is the land of Chekhov and Dostoevsky.”

And yet, as the Guide chats to Amini and Norton during a break in filming, the star of the show can’t quite resist telling me a story about how scary and tough Russians are. Recently, Norton underwent training in the Russian martial art of Systema for his new role. His trainer, David, explained the difference between English and Russian temperaments. Norton impersonates the Systema expert in his best sinister accent: “In England when you see fear you run. In Russia we see fear we shake him by the fucking hand.” Norton giggles amiably. But the point of the story is that even real-life Russians, sometimes, get a kick out of playing up to the hard-man image.

We’re enjoying the spring sunshine on the lawns of Munden House near Watford, which serves as a Russian mobster’s mansion for the eight-part drama series. Norton stars as Alex Godman, a young Russian-born British hedge-fund trader who’s sucked into the corrupting vortex of his family’s crime business. “It’s about someone who finds the Russian bear underneath the bowler hat,” explains James Watkins. What the director means is that beneath the genial suavity of British civilisation is the scary Russian psychopath, who’ll separate you from your windpipe if you look at him wrongly.

You’ll find Russian bears everywhere on TV and movies these days – and not just under the bowler hat. Many shows now seem to have a tough Russkie with mob connections, ideally played by a non-Russian actor, to up the narrative ante. In Orange Is the New Black, for instance, Galina “Red” Reznikov, played by Iowa-born Kate Mulgrew, rules her corner of Litchfield Penitentiary with an iron fist akin to Putin’s helmsmanship of the Kremlin. Plus, Mulgrew brings to the role the same gravitas she gave her character Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager.

How did Red (named after her distinctively coloured hair) come to be in the slammer? She punched the wife of the local Russian mob boss in the chest, rupturing the latter’s breast implant. As a result, Red and her husband Dmitri were obliged to pay the repair costs through tasks including storing five corpses of mob victims in their freezer – corpses that led to Red’s conviction for murder. Moral? Punching mob boss’s wives in their breast implants is never a good idea.

Culture clash … Liev Schreiber as Ray and Raymond J Barry as Dmitri in Ray Donovan. Photograph: Michael Desmond/Showtime

What’s also striking is how well this stereotype plays with viewers and critics, at least non-Russian ones. When the mob comes to town to get vengeance in the recent fourth season of Ray Donovan, for instance, one critic wrote: “I love this show’s cold war-esque portrayal of Russian culture/mobsters. They’re all criminal drug addicts!” Liev Schreiber’s eponymous La-La Land enforcer is badass, but not as badass as what one US critic was pleased to call “Dmitri and his entourage of evil”. Having duffed up Ray’s Israeli muscle Avi and taken him hostage, Dmitri (New Yorker Raymond J Barry) phones Ray to demand the return of his relative. Or, as he puts it, terrifyingly: “Mr Donovan, bring me my niece or I kill your Jew.”

And that’s the problem: 21st-century Russians rarely break out of the psychotic stereotype on western TV or cinema. Even in Arrow, the adaptation of the DC comic about billionaire playboy Oliver Queen who is also a secret hooded vigilante, we learn that our hero’s backstory includes post-shipwreck years as a captain of the Russian mob. That’s why our hero can speak the language and why, in a flashback in season five, we see Queen go toe-to-toe with Dolph Lundgren’s Russian government strongman Konstantin Kovar, who resembles Putin with bigger pecs. Lundgren, significantly, has made a successful career from playing Russian hardmen. In 1985, at the height of the Reagan-era cold war, he played Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, whom patriotic American Sylvester Stallone (in stars and stripes boxing shorts) was obliged to take down in a symbolic bout prefiguring by four years the fall of the Soviet Union. Then, Dolph was the symbolic patsy losing the old cold war for the Russians; in Arrow, more than three decades later, he’s the symbolic patsy losing the new one for them.

Dolph Lundgren, by the way, is not Russian, but Swedish.

There is so much negative propaganda about Russia – some of it true, some not

So why are Russians still ubiquitous villains nearly 30 years since the end of the cold war? Amini thinks it’s due to the association with globalised crime that makes them appealing as the go-to baddies. “In Game of Thrones terms, the Mexican cartels and the Russian mob are the two mighty kingdoms – so it felt right to have Russians at the heart of [McMafia],” he says. “But I was quite keen not to go with the cliche of the Russian mobster.” If Russians have always figured as fall guys in western TV dramas and movies, the main difference between the 1980s and now is that then they were political thugs trying to take down the west with espionage; now they’re criminal ones.

Will McMafia buck or conform to the stereotypes? On the lawn of Munden House, James Norton tells the Guide that he hopes his performance will remind us that Russians are different to what is considered the norm on cinema and TV. He says that one reason he wanted to play Alex, the Anglo-Russian who’s both revolted and seduced by his family’s criminal past, was that he is so conflicted. While Alex is proud of his Russian roots (“He has a Dostoevsky book at his bedside and he goes to Systema classes a couple of times a week”) he also agonises over what being Russian means. Will Norton manage to bring such complexities to life, bucking the trend of stereotyping them as thugs? “I hope for Russians’ sakes it counters those cliches. There’s so much negative propaganda about Russia at the moment that we digest. Some of it’s true and some of it is certainly not.”

McMafia will air next year on BBC1