As you can guess, I am a Millennial Doper, born in the very last days of the Cold War.
How much did Americans and Soviets really - *personally *- dislike each other and each other’s nations during the Cold War? Was it real hatred, or was it more like, Washington and Moscow couldn’t get along, but American and Soviet private citizenry didn’t really feel any antipathy?
As an Russian-speaking American who lived in the Soviet Union in 1988 and 1990-1991, I have to say that Russians were generally the most friendly, hospitable, generous, and welcoming people I have ever met. Of course, that was at the tail end of communism, and most people saw through the Soviet state’s propaganda. Friends who traveled there earlier, say in the 60s or 70s, encountered more politics. I remember a friend describing a Leningrad metro ride in the early 80s where a woman, upon realizing my friend was American, started shouting, “Why do you want to kill us?”
I don’t think I ever met a Russian during the entire cold war. I never had any reason to hate a Russian. The people I knew from the communist countries during that time were escapees from their respective countries. Some of those people held grudges, most definitely.
There wasn’t much (if any) interaction between normal American civilians and normal Soviet civilians for most of the Cold War. I never met a Russian/Soviet while I was growing up in the 1970s/1980s, either; there were a few defectors who wound up in the US, but not many.
My memory is that the antipathy was mostly at the national level – that is, we were opposed to the Soviet Union, as a country and an ideology, and I think it’s safe to say that a lot of Americans would have said, at that time, that they “hated” the Soviets; but, we simply didn’t ever hear much about what individual Soviets thought or felt.
There was certainly a recurring theme in fiction and comedy about how the Soviets always had to deal with shortages, and incredibly un-stylish clothing and consumer goods, due to the inadequacies of centralized economic planning. For example, this Wendy’s ad from the mid 1980s is still one of my favorite ads, and is the sort of humor about the Soviet Union that was pretty common in the U.S. at that time.
My recollection is that the attitude was mostly that the Russian people were being oppressed by their horrible government, and had to spend all their time standing in lines for food that wasn’t there anyway.
We were supposed to be afraid of, and opposed to, the USSR; but I don’t remember that being aimed at the people. We knew Hungarian refugees, and my mother’s parents were Russian (Ashkenazi) refugees, although it was the Tsar they were refugees from. That of course was unusual, and I don’t know how much it influenced my particular perception.
Yeah, even growing up and being a young man in Washington DC I’m not sure I met a heck of a lot of actual Russians during the time of the Soviet Union.
Would a Pole count? I was on a trip to the middle east in the late 80s and a woman was there from Poland. She was, IIRC, a chemist of some sort. Her opening conversation gambit - her English was good and she seemed old as hell to my Olympian 22 years - was ‘Have you ever met someone from a socialist country?’ This seemed a bit odd to me at first but she was nice enough to talk to.
It all depends. I was a kid in day camp at the local JCC then, and the camp was very generous with scholarships for newly arrived families. I think half the camp was recently arrived Soviet Jews. Really, the only thing separating us was a couple of generations (most of my ancestors were from the FSU, and all of them were from the former east Bloc). Except for the obvious linguistic issues and, to a certain extent, girls’ hairstyles, we weren’t that different from each other. There were several thousand arrivals a year in Chicago during that time, I think.
That was when I decided I had to learn Russian when I grew up. Then I got the real Soviet experience at the tail end of its existence, but that’s a whole other story.
I never did believe that actual Soviet people wanted to see all Americans dead.
P.S. Of course Chicago was chock-full of Poles, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, and other east Europeans. I knew a few - most didn’t live in my suburb. I know lots more now.
That’s a fair point; I lived in the far western Chicago suburbs when I was a small child, and then spent the rest of my childhood in Green Bay. We had few, or no, immigrants or refugees from the Soviet bloc in either area, so I suspect that people who lived in bigger cities (or at least cities which did have immigrants from Eastern Europe) had a different perspective than I did.
in Green Bay, we had a fairly large number of Hmong refugees at the end of the Vietnam War, but that’s another story.
Personally? No dislike for individuals at all. No particular like, OTOH, either. I don’t make that determination until I know something about the person.
This did remind me of a song from the time. Sting - Russians
Never met a Soviet during the Cold War, most of us didn’t. A few years later I worked with a Russian, nice guy, programmer. Left Russia first chance he got.
You could check out the documentaries like “The Russians are Coming” or “Moscow on the Hudson” or “Hunt of Red October”. 
I remember the overall perception being that Soviets all wanted to leave, but couldn’t. I think mostly people felt sorry for the oppressed Soviet citizens. On the other hand, there was real fear that the Soviet government was dangerous and the possibility of war was always present.
As I read that (and I agree, that was the general sentiment that I remember from that time), I’m reminded of how a lot of Americans probably think about North Korea and North Koreans these days.
This. The people were trapped in an inhumane society, and shot if they tried to escape. The Soviets built walls, not to keep an invading army OUT, but to keep their own citizens IN. We had nothing but sympathy for the people themselves.
That’s the difference between a cold war and a hot war. If American and Soviet soldiers started killing each other, Americans would start hating Soviets (and vice versa).
Some elements of the Soviet leadership had real fear that the American government was dangerous and the possibility of war was always present… And the people were misled and exploited by capitalists , of course
I don’t recall any disliking on either side. But, this was pre-internet days. We just didn’t have any information of the common Russian folks.
But, there was fear. And fear breeds negative thoughts. My neighbor; a taxi driver, not rich by any means, built a fallout shelter in his backyard. At that time, in the fifties and sixties, fallout shelter kits and supplies were sold. I always have wondered what became of that shelter. Would have been a cool fort for kids.
I had a relative that traveled several times to the USSR.
There were two extremes. Mainly separated by whether there was a chance that an informant might be around or if the person you’re interacting with was directly involved in the monitoring system.
An ordinary person in a safe environment would be quite friendly. After all, they wanted to buy your Levis. Extremely curious about the US but often believed some Soviet propaganda points. Esp. regarding the horrible poverty the majority of US citizens lived in.
But the ladies assigned to each floor of a hotel to monitor all the guests (and steal their toiletries) were definitely unfriendly. They had to report to the state and didn’t want to go to Siberia. The watchers were being watched.
Robert Heinlein had a pretty good article about his travel to the USSR. I think it was in Expanded Universe. The trip was around 1960.
Like others have said, our dislike was mostly aimed at the Soviet government. We generally felt sorry for the Soviet people who had to live under that government.
That’s the perception I recall; the whole hostility wasn’t for “Russians”, it was for the “Soviet Union”, “Soviets” and “Communists”, because they presumably (according to their propaganda anyway), were bent on overthrowing our democratic/capitalist way of life and instituting a communist, atheist, unfree system of government and social order.
The general consensus was that the poor Russians were groaning under all this, and weren’t bad people, but were governed by some right assholes.