My recollection as well. Born and raised on NW side of Chicago. Knew many people of Russian and eastern European heritage. Just recently looked at my HS yearbook and was surprised at the number of ethnic clubs - Ukrainian, Serbian, etc. Never thought anything negative about any of them as people.
In college, I majored in international relations, with a concentration of nuclear deterrence. (Yeah - really marketable! :rolleyes:) Read a lot of Russian history. All manner of party corruption, ineffective social policy, and expansionist policies. But nothing negative about the people. (Other than that they were all drunks! :D)
I agree with the other posters, I never saw much hostility towards Russians for being part of the USSR, the hostility was towards the Soviet Government. Slogans like ‘Better Dead than Red’ highlight that, and I don’t remember people being especially bothered by the idea of a defector coming over. While I didn’t know any emigrants from the USSR growing up, I’m quite confident that they would get less personal hostility than a black immigrant or most ‘brown’ immigrants, especially non-English speaking ones, and that if they were Jewish that would likely be a bigger point of contention than ‘former Soviet’.
I was a Cold War Kid and a military/space nut. My impression of the Soviets were that they were a worthy enemy with cool/interesting tech. If we’d ever actually had a shooting war it would have been bad for all involved and nobody wanted that. Far better to saber rattle and try to out-do each other with who had the baddest weapons. MAD made sense to me as a kid. Never held any attitude other than curiosity/fascination towards the Soviets as a people.
I toured a bit of Russia in 2014 and asked the guide what they were taught or thought of the U.S. during the cold war, expecting that they too thought of us as evil. I was surprised when she replied that they thought of America as the ideal.
My family isn’t a good one to judge by. Grandpap was a White and the family got split after that little war, Dad got called up for Korea and spent it in New Jersey because no-one trusted someone of our ancestry who spent WW II in China (he was a “security risk”) – so we had axes to grind. Communists/Soviets we hated but we knew enough to know that the actual Soviets were a small part of the population. And spending the closing parts in an area everyone knew was targeted ---- well we never went as far as a shelter but we did have bug-out plans. You almost have to separate it between 50-60s and then the 70s. By the 70s the real fear was more of the few at the top on both sides and a sense of kinship with the younger generation of Russians.
In the middle to late 1980’s a Soviet fishing processor boat had some kind of damage event and came into Astoria, Or. for repairs. The Sulak it was. Most of the crew were allowed limited shore leave and quickly ran out of money. Me and two other local people met a couple in a local bar and they invited us down to visit the Sulak. I thought they would have been more restricted but they were just some young people fishing for hake (pacific whiting) before the US got into the market.
We went down to this rather large ship. We met a guy at the bottom of the ramp, I think they referred to him as ‘uncle’ or some other similar term, English was a little spotty, uncle is probably wrong, these were just 20 something year old people working on a fishing boat. At the top of the ramp we met another official of some kind, and then we went to their room and had shots of vodka. A few minutes later another guy came into the cabin who pretended not to understand English, but it was clear to me, and the Russians who invited us, that he was there to monitor the conversation. No problem. The young woman who invited us and spoke the best English said that she was out on this ship hoping to bring home enough money to buy a car.
Shots of vodka and these tasty little sausages. I asked her what they were and she just looked at me like I was stupid and said…Safeway! Even those guys who were obviously apprehensive about our visit were the most normal people you could imagine.
It was just about the time for the Berlin Wall to fall and these people already knew that the US was not a real threat to them. Their feeling of envy and friendship was what I came away with. I hope she got her car.
I did meet several US citizens in the 60s and 70s who had emigrated from Latvia and Poland. They hated each and every Soviet on a personal level.
Two years ago, my wife and I spent two days in Moscow on a return trip from Cyprus. My FIL, who served in the US Army in Germany in the 50s, was truly upset that we were spending time there. I was shocked about this. He actually asked us to change our plans. It was obvious that he just didn’t like or trust anybody in the (former) USSR.
Ah yes, the good old nuclear powered people incinerators! Sorta funny how we were told the Russians hated capitalism but wanted our stuff (and they’d burn it all for the chance to get at it); and we were told we loved capitalism, even as it found in us a very fertile resource for exploitation. I never got the idea that it mattered whether or not we liked or disliked each other. There were enough barriers to us ever meeting in large numbers that they might as well have been from Mars.
Another kid from the Cold War chiming in. Definitely, there was a sense that the people in the soviet union were that much different from us, they just lived in a very different government/economic system. The hostility was between the governments and the ideologues, not the common people.
I tend to agree with this assessment. The same sort of distinction we had to make during WW2 where Americans were supposed to hate the Nazis, not the German people. The Japanese, however, during this same period were regarded as sub-human. No issues with throwing them in a cage, or using atomic weapons on that species’ cities.
Not American (at the time) but growing up in Holland during the Cold War. We were subject to conscription, and it seemed clear to some of us that for many of us our function was going to be to slow the Russians down for a couple hours when they eventually came through the Fulda gap. Being a human speed bump made us negatively inclined to both those who were to hit the bump, and those who put it there. The dislike for “our side” was limited to the government of both the Netherlands and the USA, for the other side it was more broadly “the Russians”, but I don’t think we ever thought it through enough to decide whether that included regular Joes or not.
A few years before the fall of the wall, my encounters with Russians were invariably friendly, except when the subject of soccer came up (Soviet teams played execrably boring, defensive, soccer - a point I probably made more often than needed).
Just as an anecdote, I remember during high school (1987-1991) having something of a Eureka! moment after having read a few books about the Soviet Union, including Suvorov’s “Inside the Soviet Army”, Steinbeck’s “A Russian Journal”, and some basic history about the Eastern Front.
Basically it all fell into place; the Soviets were TERRIFIED of the US/NATO after having suffered through WWII, and pretty much everything they’d done since 1945 was engineered to NOT have to fight a war like that ever again. Of course, our governments were equally terrified of them, because a lot of what the Soviets were doing was viewed as provocative or aggressive- placing huge numbers of troops in East Germany and the Warsaw Pact in general; spending HUGE amounts on weaponry , and keeping a huge peacetime draft in place in order to maintain a colossal military. I imagine the thinking was “Why do they have such a huge military and tens of thousands of tanks, if they don’t plan on using them?” and that spooked us.
Even the Hungarian Uprising and Prague Spring made a sort of sense when viewed through the lens of the Russians thinking of the Warsaw Pact states as a sort of buffer vs. NATO- better to crush those uprisings than to have NATO troops potentially stationed on their borders.
Now none of that is meant to imply that the Soviets were decent, but misguided. That’s absolutely not true. But it is illuminating as a lens to view history through.
As an American kid in the early-mid '80s, I remember the general attitude being that we didn’t like their government, but that wasn’t the average citizen’s fault. They weren’t telling us “these are bad people” in school. Quite the opposite, in fact - when the subject came up in Social Studies classes, it was generally something along the lines of “here’s a day in the life of Natasha Ivanov, a child living in Smolensk. She loves her mama and papa, and they love her. She goes to school while Papa goes to work in the local tile factory and Mama stands in line for bread. See how alike we are? Isn’t it too bad that she has to live where she does?” Not even my dad, a cold warrior who’d served with the SAC, had anything bad to say about the people themselves. The only real antipathy I ever heard was from my grandparents, and that was pretty easily chalked up to them being, well, grandparents.
Basically that’s true. My wife spent a month in the SU in the summer of 1960 and the people she met were uniformly friendly. She was about to start teaching Russian in HS and this was a kind of finishing school so meeting people and talking to them was encouraged.
It didn’t help that it was politically impossible for NATO to adopt a strategy of defense in depth and position troops accordingly, because people in Germany (and other countries) would not continue to support NATO if they said ‘in the event of war, we’re just going to let the Red Army take these cities’. To keep the objections down, NATO had to have a strategy of giving up no ground and so deployed troops right at the border. But from a military perspective, that is a stupid deployment for defense, but exactly what you want if you’re planning to attack. Like you said, this doesn’t mean ‘the Soviets were innocent and misguided’, but does shed some light on how each side viewed the other as more hostile than they were.
As a student in about '78 to '80 learning Russian, I met a few Russian people in the US who were more or less recent immigrants or visiting. They had no hatred for us (and of course this sample population probably wouldn’t). They would tell us jokes that Russians shared at home. For example, the two big Soviet news agencies were Pravda (the word for “Truth”) and Tass (the word for “News”). The joke in Russian was that “In News there is no truth, and in Truth there is no news.” We learned expressions like “under the boot” for peoples and places being taken over by the Soviets, and “better to be silent” about saying the wrong thing about the leadership. And we learned that if we ever travel to the Soviet Union we should bring extra “dzhince” (jeans) to sell them, and renounce our Soviet citizenship before we go to lessen the slight possibility that authorities there would detain us if we had valuable job skills.
So, overall, the people there liked Americans, and the government was a problem. They might also have worried about what our government would do given the chance. But, then, I worry about that too.
I never got the idea that it mattered whether or not we liked or disliked each other. There were enough barriers to us ever meeting in large numbers that they might as well have been from Mars.