Dirty Communists



"A. Corrupt the young... Make them superficial, destroy their ruggedness. B. ...Get them interested in sex, books and plays and other trivialities... By psychopolitics create chaos... Kill our enemies. And bring to Earth, through Communism, the greatest peace Man has ever known.""

- Rules For Revolution (1946), They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes

""The only good communist is a dead communist!""

Dirty Communists are, essentially, Cold War-era villainous portrayals of the Soviet Union's people. After World War Two, there was a very large effort to make them stock villains the same way Those Wacky Nazis were and still are. Special attention is brought to emphasizing all those wacky tropes found in Glorious Mother Russia.

Although Dirty Commies reached its height with the Cold War, the trope began at the turn of the 20th Century as communism and anarchism began to take root in the capitalist powers. Indeed, even before that, the title "The Communist Manifesto" itself was an ironic attack on Europe's fear of "communism," at the time meaning a return to loosely-allied city-states.

Given the fact that the Soviet leadership was often tremendously paranoid and ran large-scale systems of political repression and censorship, the Soviet government's reputation in the west is bound to be very negative. This trope, however, is for when the previously mentioned evils of the Soviet Union are caricatured or used for comedic purposes (as pictured). With the end of the Cold War, this has become a mostly Discredited Trope, though it oddly has a lot more universal success with Post-Soviet villains than it has ever had with actual Communist ones. Related to Red Scare. It remains a significant legacy trope that many authors still use.

See Red China for a similar trope dealing with that other Communist power.

Tropes commonly associated with Dirty Communists are:


 * The Baroness
 * Berlin Wall
 * Cold War
 * Commissar Cap
 * Day of the Jackboot
 * Deep-Cover Agent
 * Fake Russian
 * General Ripper
 * Glorious Mother Russia
 * The Great Politics Mess-Up ...after the Cold War.
 * Hammer and Sickle Removed For Your Protection
 * Hot Line
 * Iron Curtain
 * Mnogo Nukes
 * Nuke'Em
 * A Nuclear Error
 * The Political Officer
 * Red October
 * Red Scare
 * Reds With Rockets
 * Reporting Names
 * Romanovs and Revolutions (The Russian Revolution)
 * Secret Police
 * Soviet Superscience
 * Why We're Bummed Communism Fell

Anime & Manga

 * The Soviet powers in Future War 198X are the villains, murdering millions to get the designs for a missile defense system into their hands.

Comic Books

 * During the fifties, Captain America (comics) of the very popular World War II comics was set against communists. The title folded quickly. Years later Marvel wanted to bring him back from near the end of the war. Who was the fifties version? An 'Evil' Cap and 'Evil' Bucky who had changed their names and faces to seem like the genuine article, made into a Knight Templar and driven madly paranoid by a version of the Super Soldier Serum. Later Cap battled Evil Cap and Evil Bucky. Evil Bucky eventually became non-evil and sidekicked for a while before being killed; Evil Cap became a supervillain for a while, died, and recently, after the death of real Cap, came back not so evil though still slightly bent, ramping up the "righteous revolution" elements for all they're worth.
 * The Fifties Cap fought a Communist Red Skull, who had supposedly transferred his allegience from the far right to the far left simply because they were the bad guys now. Eventually, the real Red Skull returned, was still a Nazi, and killed the pretender.
 * Iron Man was actually created to fight these guys. Many long lasting characters like the Black Widow and some less long lasting like the Crimson Dynamo are a result of his constant battles against the 'Red Menace.' In fact, the moral difference between The Cape (trope) Captain America and Tony, who can drift into Well-Intentioned Extremist territory, can be explained by one of them being created to fight Nazis, and one to fight Communists.
 * Danger Girl mocks this trope by creating the outrageous 'Hammer' organization that combines Nazism and Communism (!!)
 * Averted in the G.I. Joe comic series written by Larry Hama and published by Marvel. The Joes' Russian counterparts, Oktober Guard, were actually reluctant allies of the Joes who set aside their differences to fight against the Cobras. The only time the Soviet Union is ever referred as an "evil empire" is done sarcastically by one of the characters. Quite a feat, considering the comic was published during the Reagan era. Of course, portrayals of their soldiers and their government are two entirely different things.
 * Also averted in Larry Hama's Nth Man the Ultimate Ninja, despite being set in the middle of World War III between the US and the USSR. The Soviet military might praise Glorious Mother Russia, but they're highly competent, no-nonsense professionals. Too bad they're facing the world's deadliest assassin...
 * The Red Ghost is another Marvel villain with his team of super-apes (!!)
 * The Tick (animation) parodied this trope with a villain-for-hire actually called the Red Scare, who would take jobs dressing up in supervillain attire themed around communist Russian symbology, pretend to menace some major public place, and then get defeated by his customers in a staged fight. The whole affair went hilariously awry when the Red Scare's customer was late to arrive, and the Tick, mistaking him for a real supervillain, attempted seriously to thwart him.
 * Red Scare made an appearance in the live-action series as well, but in a completely different form. There, he was a 25-year-old Soviet combat android designed for one purpose: to kill Jimmy Carter. A group of diehard Russian commandos (or something) unearth it as part of a poorly-explained plan to destroy the U.S. Postal System, but the robot goes haywire (at the exact same time as Jimmy Carter arrives in town for a book signing).
 * X-Men villain Omega Red was made as a Soviet Captain America (comics) before turning into a Terrorist Without a Cause.
 * Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is an unusually early non-American example.
 * One of the members of the "evil" superhero team the Ultimates of Ultimate Marvel encounter is a Russian Thor copy named Perun (the Slavic god of thunder) who carried a hammer and sickle instead of a magical hammer. The implications are obvious, despite the comic being published 15 years after the Cold War ended.
 * For one thing, the actual Slavic god Perun did carry a hammer and a sickle in the old myths. For another, he's based on the 616 Perun of the Winter Guard/People's Protectorate/Supreme Soviets.
 * For another,
 * Played for laughs in Fighting American—the villains were still Communists, but they had names like Ghnortz, Bholhtz, and Hotsky Trotsky. Of course, since after a couple of episodes the entire series was a Captain America (comics) spoof, this is unsurprising.
 * Surprisingly, the Rocket Red Brigade (the first Russian super-team in the DC Universe) managed to avoid this. Kilowog, their original creator, was the sole survivor of an alien race that was naturally community-oriented, and he was portrayed as an idealist who genuinely believed in the Soviet Union's potential. Brigade members varied widely in personality and outlook, but many of them took on heroic roles against bigger threats like alien invaders.
 * The trope image is from "This Godless Communism," a feature appearing in Treasure Chest, a comic book published by the Catholic Guild and primarily distributed in Catholic parochial schools. The feature portrayed life in America after a hypothetical Communist takeover, with particular focus on the materialistic and anti-religious nature of Communism.

Film

 * Rambo First Blood Part II and Rambo III gave John Rambo the Reagan-esque patriotism that the previously disenchanted with America character has since become famous for.
 * The image of John Rambo as an uber-patriotic flag waver is a false one. At the end Rambo II he is so disgusted by the government's attempt to cover up the fact that American prisoners of war are still being held in Vietnam that he doesn't return home. In Rambo III he is motivated by his desire to rescue his old friend Colonel Trautman rather than duty to the country he was born in.
 * Red Dawn is arguably the quintessential anti-communist movie of the 1980s.
 * Red Scorpion shows Russians as inhuman killing machines, except the one who turns against them.
 * Rocky IV created Ivan Drago whom remains one of the most recognizable symbols of Communism of the 80s.
 * An episode of The Colbert Report featured a "special update" on the Cold War. The opening montage featured Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, Drago, and Yakov Smirnoff.
 * America's favorite adventuring archaeologist fights some Dirty Communists in his fourth film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
 * This particular example seems more of a homage to Cold War era pulp fiction, fitting the overall theme of the series pretty well.
 * Dirty Communists were also the villains in LucasArts' game Indiana Jones and The Infernal Machine.
 * Much of Chuck Norris' body of work. Especially Invasion USA.
 * Averted somewhat in The Beast of War (1988), which takes an unflinching look at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan through the eyes of a tank crew being stalked by mujaheddin forces—both Soviets and Afghans are portrayed as human as well as brutal.
 * French comedy La cité de la peur features a hammer-and-sickle-wielding (literally!) serial killer. His motives are not political; however, he's copying a similarly armed killer from the film within the film Red Is Dead, a dirty communist indeed, who kills rich people because "profit was unbearable from his proletarian perspective."
 * Clint Eastwood's film Firefox.
 * Angelina Jolie's Salt is about the Soviet Union having a secret program of sleeper agents out to destroy the United States and restore the Soviet Union. Given they intend to blow up Mecca to frame the United States for it, they are a PROFOUND collection of dicks.

Literature

 * The Imperial Order in the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind is blatantly portrayed as a fantasy Soviet State.
 * The People's Republic of Haven in Honor Harrington is an example of a science fiction communist state, especially after the revolution against the Legislaturists.
 * Ian Fleming's James Bond novels are especially guilty of this. SMERSH (which did exist in real life, albeit briefly and with a more limited purview) is an organization that sponsors countless crazy schemes to destroy the West and the communists tend to be both sexually "perverted" (Klebb is a Psycho Lesbian) as well as disfigured. Oddly, the movies would largely avert this in place of the smaller SPECTRE. Furthermore the evil "General G" of the novels becomes the much more genial General Gogol in the Roger Moore movies. Gogol is very much the face of the USSR in Bond films of this age. For instance, in Moonraker, it is he, not the Soviet premier whom the US leadership talk to over the hotline in a crisis and in Octopussy it is Gogol who personally oversees the pursuit and shooting of a warmongering traitor who wanted to invade the West. Although he is a villain in For Your Eyes Only, he is far nicer than the others in the movie and Bond doesn't even attempt to hurt him. In the Brosnan era he actually becomes an elder statesman figure (albeit off-screen, due to Walter Gottell's death) for the now friendly Russian Federation.
 * Colonel Sun is an example of how politics can get REALLY ugly in the James Bond-verse. Kingsley Amis, under the pseudonym Robert Markham, wrote a very Fleming-like interpretation of the Chinese Dirty Communists threat with the titular sexual sadist. What's really appalling about the book is that the book contains countless humanized Soviet villains as it goes out of its way to say how different they are from the Chinese!
 * Gen. Orlov from Octopussy is a full-fledged villain, but General Gogol investigates him in unwitting parallel to Bond's mission. The result of that was Gogol attempted to arrest Orlov before the East German border guards shot the renegade general dead and it's fairly obvious that if Gogol had learned Orlov's whole scheme, he would have raced to warn NATO.
 * The first few Bond novels written by John Gardner show SPECTRE working on behalf of the Soviets, although It's Personal against Bond as well.
 * Dennis Wheatley had a real thing for bashing commies. Even in the stories for which he is now remembered, the Black Magic books, there is a Dirty Communist link, as the blurb on the back of The Satanist puts it: Colonel Varney had long suspected a link between Devil Worship and the subversive influence of Soviet Russia...
 * The Bulldog Drummond story The Black Gang.
 * The Mike Hammer story One Lonely Night. It even admits that the commies are drawn to resemble a red-baiting editorial cartoon of the day. Still, there is An Aesop about America not needing to stoop to the Reds' level.
 * In The Zone, a 1980's action series by James Rouch (set in an Alternate History World War Three Europe) the Warsaw Pact officers are universally portrayed as brutal sadists, who casually murder civilians and even their own soldiers if it suits their purpose or whim. However The Survivialist series by Jerry Ahern (written about the same time, and set in a post-World War Three Soviet-occupied United States) makes sure to offset its evil communist villains with decent chaps such as General Varakov and KGB agent Natalia Tiemerovna.
 * In the 1970's action-adventure series The Executioner, Red China is mentioned as being involved in the drug trade, which given what the CIA was up to in Cambodia and Vietnam is ironic (a similar mention is made in the James Bond film Thunderball). When the series was sold to Gold Eagle in the 1980's the KGB became the main villains, often portrayed as The Chessmaster behind international terrorism.
 * Averted in one character of Ayn Rand's We the Living, with Andrei Taganov possibly being the most sympathetic communist in any anti-communist work, and perhaps the most sympathetic character Ayn Rand has written.
 * The rest of Rand's works play this one straight, though.
 * The novel Malevil has Meyssonnier, a literal card carrying Communist and resents the suspicion and distrust he receives from it. Like a good commie he is both an atheist and has para-military training.

Live-Action TV

 * Klingons were originally meant to represent the Soviet Union during the Cold War but have since become the prototypical proud warrior race.
 * Star Trek: The Original Series averts this trope when they included Chekov in the crew. He was very proudly Russian, and the Cold War was at its height when the series first aired.
 * The Cardassians later take over this role (appropriately updated for the late-80s-early-90s) through their sparse appearances in The Next Generation and especially in Deep Space Nine: vaguely described early on as an impoverished people with "deep spiritual values" who embraced a military dictatorship as a solution. Later, a decaying authoritarian super-power forced to relinquish its hold on the peoples it once held subject.
 * This becomes quite blatant if you listen to some of the lunch conversations between Bashir and Garak, as Garak often takes a Straw Communist position when they debate some matter of politics or philosophy. Also, there is the title what the Cardassian's greatest creative work: The Neverending Sacrifice.
 * Danger Man.
 * I Spy
 * Subverted in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. by creating the S.P.E.C.T.R.E like Thrush for both the East and Western blocs to team up against, and by teaming American Napoleon Solo with Russian Illya Kuryakin as the heroes.
 * Airwolf was a post-Vietnam series that nevertheless reinforced the need for the communist menace to be stopped.
 * Alias had K-Directorate, which seemed to be a Post-Soviet Free Agency (read: Terrorist). Likewise, it had Sydney's mom turn out to be a Russian Spy with two unreconstructed communist sisters.
 * MacGyver (where the Soviets get called Soviets)
 * In Doctor Who, the Cybermen are sometimes viewed as a Soviet metaphor to balance the clearly Nazi Daleks (they're uniform, emotionless, and sometimes want to convert their enemies instead of slaughtering them).
 * When they show non-metaphorical Soviets, however, this is averted: they aren't the villains, and one of them is a humanized, sympathetic character that helps out the heroes.
 * In the animated serial Dreamland, set in 1958, the Doctor chastises the American colonel Stark for wanting to wipe out all Russians.
 * Stephen Colbert believes that the Cold War is still going on.
 * WKRP in Cincinnati's Les Nessman was paranoid about Dirty Communists, to the point that the emergency script he wrote for the station was an anti-Communist screed. When a tornado struck Cincinnati, Mr. Carlson ordered him to read the script on the air but to replace "Communist" with "tornado", which resulted in a long harangue about "Godless tornadoes" followed by the national anthem. His paranoia was explained in the final season when it was revealed that his father, who had abandoned their family when he was an infant, was himself a Communist, and that his mother had consequently instilled in Les a hatred of Communists.
 * And then, there's, well, John Cleese's take on the subject...

Tabletop Games

 * The Price of Freedom plays it absolutely straight. In one early edition of one scenario the leader of the KKK is referred to favourably as he is anti-red. Oddly the commies are presented as taking away black and Jewish people for no apparent reason. If that's what communists did, wouldn't the Nightie Knights have switched their burning crosses for red flags long ago?
 * Strangely enough at least some KKK groups did expose sentiments that were if not communist then highly socialist during the 1930s.
 * Paranoia takes the notion of a Red Scare to the Nth degree and beyond, usually with humourous effect.
 * The Star*Drive setting has a nation called the Nariac Domain, which consists of spacefaring cyber-communists.
 * Halt Evil Doer! has Battle Czar, who is a communist Anti-Villain turned terrorist. Amusingly, he's close friends with flag-waving terrorist leader, General Venom.

Video Games
"Premier Cherdenko: We will sign this treaty, we will come together as brothers, and then... we will crush them!"
 * The Command & Conquer: Red Alert series deals with Communist threats that start off half-way serious with an alternate continuity World War II and then go totally insane by the expansion pack Yuri's Revenge.
 * To the extent that even when you're playing as them they still come across as jerks:

""Stars and Stripes beats Hammer and Sickle. LOOK IT UP, COMMIE!""
 * Parodied in the first Destroy All Humans! video game, which is set in the 1950s; The Government and the sinister Government Conspiracy use the overwhelming paranoia around communism to cover up the actions of the protagonist—who is actually an extraterrestrial. The population eventually buys into this to such a degree that people actually scream "Communist!" as soon as they see the alien in his natural form, and the police / military report "Possible Communist activity," when the protagonist is going around vapourising people and sucking out their brains.
 * Freedom Fighters is pretty much the video game version of Red Dawn, where the main antagonists are Communists invading America and you play as a leader of the resistance who is trying to push them out of the country. The major difference is, it's all taking place in New York and not Middle America.
 * The James Bond vehicle Everything or Nothing shows a Post-Soviet Union villain attempting to resurrect it.
 * Metal Gear Solid had several examples of this. The most Egregious one is Colonel Volgin whom is a Depraved Bisexual that possesses lightning powers and a desire to start nuclear war with the West. Of course, the game he appears in is one long love letter to 1960s spy movies, so he's not too out of place. Revolver Ocelot might also qualify despite being ultimately disloyal to the Soviet system. Olga and Sergei Gurlukovich despite being unreconstructed communists, are played fairly honorably and thus do not fall under the Dirty Communists trope.
 * Let us not forget World in Conflict, in which the Dirty Communists decide to bring their dirt to Seattle (and Ellis Island, at one point). Despite the fact that the game goes out of its way to portray the Soviets as desperate enough actually to consider such an obviously untenable attack as a valid tactic, the characters in the game mostly just refer to them as damn Communists.
 * However, the developers seem to by trying to avert this trope, since the upcoming expansion will be played on the Soviet perspective of the war.
 * Arguably averted without Soviet Assault anyway. The character who is most vocal in his communism comments is The Neidermeyer, and other American soldiers, while going seemingly overboard at times, are perfectly justified in their attitudes; consider the state of mind they're in and what their opinion of the enemy must be while they're under the stress of their country being invaded, and it seems less absurd and more perfectly believable. Evan Wright noted this phenomenon (or the reverse of it) in Generation Kill, where the Marines he embedded with as they invaded Iraq often made very racist comments about Iraqis and each other, but very few of them were actually racist.
 * The state of the world in the Fallout series is due to a war with communist China.
 * Fallout 3 parodies this to the Nth degree. Malfunctioning military robots leftover from the war will often attack the player while screaming anti-Communist epithets at them. Members of the Republic of Dave will call you a Communist and attack you if you antagonize them. And in the game's final battle, U.S. Forgotten Superweapon Liberty Prime makes many amusing anti-Communist battle cries ("Communism is a temporary setback on the road to freedom!" "Embrace democracy or you will be eradicated!"). The Liberty Prime example is especially ironic, as he yells anti-Communist battle cries while fighting against the totalitarian remnant of the U.S. government.
 * It's either them, or the Brotherhood of Steel, who are the remnant U.S. Military. Prime recognizes them and their armor, but has probably never seen a Mark 2 and would assume it to be the enemy's.
 * Subverted somewhat in the series as a whole with regards to the Soviet Union, who aren't touched upon much but when they are it's usually in a friendly light with regards to the U.S. One of the pre-made player characters in the original Fallout was a descendant of a member of the Soviet Consulate in LA who was given an invitation to Vault 13. Also, it's noted somewhere that the development of Liberty Prime was aided by Soviet scientists (irony!).
 * Freedom Force plays this straight with Nuclear Winter and somewhat averts this with (somewhat) with Red October who teams up with the Freedom Force in the sequel.
 * At about the same time that Rambo II and Red Dawn were in their heyday, there was an arcade video game named Rush 'N Attack. It was exactly what it sounds like.
 * The Heavy from Team Fortress 2. At least, that's how The Soldier sees him.


 * Home Front is a game where you see the menace of the North Korean government take over Japan, Korea, and the Philippines before invading the United States' plague ridden ruins. It was written by John Milius of Red Dawn fame, and he truly outdoes himself here, even seeing fit to include the page quote.
 * Vega Strike has ISO (Interstellar Socialist Organization), though their image is mixed. In game and flavour materials some call them pirates and terrorists equal to Luddites, while in one mission they act as a counterbalance to Merchant Guild captain thinking he's a greater priority than a shipload of wounded. They definitely are a paramilitary group habitually stealing stuff, but not attacking civilians. However, between their choice of ships, leaving privateers alone and general image of being a little out of sync, ISO ends up as a circus cosplaying Robin Hood—potentially mildly dangerous, but not to be taken quite seriously.
 * Heavy Weapon has your Atomic Tank fight through the forces of the "Red Star", which are Russian Communists trying to take over the world. The game is pretty blatant about it as well, with your character saying things like "Take THAT, you commie pigs!", stages named "Killingrad", and bosses like "Kommie Kong".

Web Original
"Red: But Earthling, they don't have Decemberween on my planet! Old-Timey Homestar: Aww, phooey! What do they have on your planet? Red: Not much. Long lines. Expensive bread."
 * In The Gamers Alliance, the Proninist Party is basically that setting's version of communists.
 * The Gemini Galaxy of Imperium Nova has the United Federation of People's Republics, inspired by this trope. On the other hand, thanks to the nature of the galaxy they're in, they're one of the better factions.
 * Parodied on Homestar Runner with Rumble Red, the space commie.

"11. Not allowed to join the Communist Party."
 * Red Dawn Plus 20 explores the universe of the titular movie from a point 20 years "downstream", expanding vastly on the movie's world into a plausible and rich timeline from the standpoint of veterans of the war.
 * Subverted in the Alternate History timeline Reds!. The Dirty Communists turn out to be very much the heroes of the work, in spite of their moral complexity.
 * Despite world history being changed big way in 1200, the Chaos Timeline also has them. Except that everyone calls them Socialists. They take over Britain in the mid 19th century and spread over all of Western Europe.
 * Chairman Nuke lives and breaths this trope.
 * Skippys List has examples:

Western Animation
"US representative: The Soviet Union? I thought you guys broke up? Russian representative: Yes, that is what we wanted you to think!"
 * Boris and Natasha of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show are a typical example of Cold War spies.
 * The "Old Timey" Homestar Runner cartoons set in 1936, but using tropes from all over the recent past, contained an alien called "Rumble Red", who claimed that they did not have (insert topic) on HIS planet ("...rumble!"), to which Homestar would reply "That's cause you're a communist fool, Red."
 * Adverted with Linka, the Wind Planeteer from Captain Planet. She's a Russian Ukrainian girl with quite a temper, but is shown as a quite nice and even sympathetic character despite this flaw.
 * In the "Justice Friends" shorts from Dexter's Laboratory, Major Glory's (a Captain America (comics) Captain Ersatz) archnemesis was a Dirty Communists villain parody named Comrade Red who even used a weaponized hammer and sickle. Especially notable as Dexter's Lab came out years after the Cold War ended, but it's also worth remembering that Genndy Tartakovsky was born in the USSR.
 * In a season nine episode of "The Simpsons", "Simpson Tide", Homer ends up in command of a nuclear sub and accidentally steers it toward Russia. This prompts an immediate emergency UN meeting, in which the Russian representative refers to his people as the Soviet Union, prompting the following exchange:


 * He then presses a button on his desk and the Soviet banner drops in Red Square, the turf rolls back and the Berlin Wall complete with guards and dogs rises out of the ground, and Lenin busts out of his tomb, yelling "Must crush capitalism!"

Real Life

 * There were some rather depraved people in the upper echelons of the CPSU, such as (it is generally agreed), NKVD head Lavrentiy Beria tops the lot, as a serial rapist with a reputation for executing people on transparently ridiculous charges.
 * His political opponents later had quite the last laugh, publicly convicting him on trumped-up charges of espionage for Japan of all places, and putting him in front of a firing squad. Everyone immediately got the subtext.
 * There is some evidence that his depravity was actually Khruschev's fabrication—the baldie was too deeply in Stalin's inner circle and tried to distance from it by some energetic mud-slinging. Especially in the light of the fact that Beria was made NKVD head to stop purges that were getting out of hand. Though the fact that he was a ruthless and entirely conscious-less bastard is indisputable, he was just too efficient for all these accusations.
 * It's not confirmed by any means, but one story has Marshal Georgy Zhukov gaining a Crowning Moment of Awesome by storming into Beria's office on the night of the arrest and declaring "In the name of the Soviet people, you son of a bitch, you are under arrest!"
 * There's another variant of the tale—in which Zhukov shot Beria during arrest, and the whole "trial" thing was just a coverup.
 * Another complication with Dirty Communists is that many revolutionary communists, anarchists and Mensheviks (the "moderate" communist party) revolted against Bolshevik rule. Trotsky's decision to side with the Bolshies against the Kronstadt shipyard-worker's rebellion/uprising is generally considered a Moral Event Horizon for the Soviet government, which was thereafter Soviet in name only ("Soviet" is Russian for "government by worker's council", e.g. town-meeting style government by the industrial unions). Trotsky was rewarded poorly for siding with Lenin and the dictatorship when Stalin took over after Lenin's death. Fearful that Trotsky would pose a threat to Stalin's one-man rule as an icon of the revolution, he was pursued to the ends of the earth, eventually being assassinated in Mexico City.
 * Since then, the Communist parties in the West have been largely Trotskyist and claim that the Trotskyist parties of the Fourth International represent the only true Communism and that the Soviet government was actually State Capitalist. This is why the New Left in The Sixties was hostile to the rump Communist Party-US, which only gained traction during the period of US-Soviet friendship, and highly enamored of Chairman Mao instead.
 * Well, some of them were. Anarchists like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky definitely weren't.
 * But then, Chomsky did great job protecting reputation of the poor little Khmer Rouge from "vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign" - he was among the most active whitewashers of Cambodian genocide. This "anarchism" is curiously asymmetric.
 * This is actually the subtext of Animal Farm, which George Orwell (a British socialist) wrote as a critique of the Soviet government's corruption of the Left, and totalitarianism in general. The pig representing Trotsky, a radical idealist, is "disappeared" by the pig representing Stalin, who can be seen consorting with the plant owners at the end of the book.
 * Considering in the Real World most scholars are usually only divided on how many tens of millions of people were killed under various Communist rulers like, Stalin or Mao, it wouldn't be difficult to find any number of real life figures who fit this trope to a T.
 * Germany, Japan and Italy, whom we call the Axis Powers today, first called their group 'The Anti-Comintern Pact' on the strength of this trope, the Comintern meaning 'Communist International'. After all, the revolution, Red Terror, famines and purges in Russia predated Hitler's atrocities so at the time the Soviet Union had much worse PR.
 * Of course, given the secrecy of the regimes and the limited amount of unsupervised foreign correspondence allowed in early Soviet history, it's debatable whether or not this was the real reason why the West were so hostile to the USSR. They did probably recognise the murderous bastard aspects of the leaders, though.
 * It didn't help that the Soviets FIRST played a role in resurrecting the specter of German military aggression in their 20's-30's in their training exchanges with the radical elements of the German military that provided Hitler with the raw material to begin his campaign. Or the fact that they were very quick to make their accommodations with Hitler after the "Munich Alliance" fell through. Or that even before that they had been talking about starting a "worldwide conflagration." So, in other words, the Kremlin's moves to make an alliance with Berlin were what largely moved the West to try and accommodate Berlin. Yeah. Nice job breaking it, Politburo.
 * Interestingly, because the Treaty of Versailles forbid any military research in Germany after the end of WWI, the German military developed their technology in other countries, for example the u-boats in Finland and tanks in the Soviet union. The cool tanks of Germany and the Soviet Union, was the fruits of this co-operation for the participant countries.
 * It should be noted regarding the above that, while the Soviet Union genuinely did do a lot of not-very-nice things that earned them a honestly poor reputation during this time, a large part of this bad PR also stems from the fact that there were plenty of western capitalists and members of other traditional authorities (churches, aristocracy, etc) who didn't like the idea of a state run according to socialist and anti-capitalist principles where (theoretically at least) the workers had the power instead of the traditional bosses, and who also had a lot of money to throw around in propaganda against these ideas. This was also a key reason why there were a lot of aristocrats and powerful industrialists (such as Henry Ford among others) who ended up getting quite chummy with Nazi Germany and it's senior figures around this time.
 * Henry Ford exported a great deal of material and production licenses in the USSR in the late 1920s to early 1930s. He gradually dropped it when he realized they snubbed him. For some bizarre reason, they felt the need to prove there still was no sympathy "for the evil capitalist"...
 * China is taking over the USSR's spot in "countries the US media feels obliged to portray in a villainous light"?
 * They seem to be getting a more "misguided, greedy, and sorta corrupt" slate similar to Eagle Land Type 2, albeit in a diametrically opposed fashion. And whether they really count as communists anymore is debatable (though they are definitely still authoritarian). Technically, that sort of government is known as state capitalism.
 * There are hints of Soviet style military expansion taking place and are considered worrisome to a few. Like their development of the Chengdu J-20 Stealth Fighter (already in flight testing stage), and more recently, their own Aircraft Carrier, the "ex-Varyag" (an old unfinished Soviet Carrier bought from Ukraine on the pretext of turning it into a floating amusement park or hotel, which turned out to be a farce, and it's been refitted and is now ongoing sea trials).
 * India has/is building the Vikramaditiya, Vikrant and IAC-2, Russia has two carrier orders confirmed and plans to make four more and Japan and South Korea have/are building helicopter carriers (Hyuga and Ise for Japan, Dokdo, Marado, Baengnyeongdo and Ieodo for South Korea), not to mention the USA has eleven. There again, China has also announced plans to build five modern carriers, which may agree with the previous analysis.