Make the Bear Angry Again: Difference between revisions

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There are two solutions: [[Renegade Russian]], or Make The Bear Angry Again.

The latter is where Russia stays in its authoritarian military democracy, or ditches that silly "democracy" bit altogether, and grows increasingly aggressive, possibly reabsorbing the post-Soviet states as some sort of a Rebuilt Soviet Union, Eurasian Empire or something equally scary sounding. This allows Russia to start attacking places again and being generally assertive. Probably will not involve actual bears, [[Everything's Worse with Bears|unless Russia decides to get serious this time]]. ([[Command ~~and~~ Conquer Red Alert 3|Or not]].)

The latter is where Russia stays in its authoritarian military democracy, or ditches that silly "democracy" bit altogether, and grows increasingly aggressive, possibly reabsorbing the post-Soviet states as some sort of a Rebuilt Soviet Union, Eurasian Empire or something equally scary sounding. This allows Russia to start attacking places again and being generally assertive. Probably will not involve actual bears, [[Everything's Worse with Bears|unless Russia decides to get serious this time]]. ([[Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3|Or not]].)

More or less [[Truth in Television]]: while diplomatic relations between United States and Russia did improve after the end of the [[Cold War]], antagonism still exists between the said two countries. It should be noted that things gotten a bit more sour when [[Vladimir Putin]] came into play.

This trope is also played with in some Russian fiction; it's close to playing it straight, but of course it's not viewed [[My Country, Right or Wrong|as a bad thing]].

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* Pretty much every other computer game and novel with a modern warfare setting ([[Tom Clancy]] produces examples of ''both'').

** Except that ''The Hunt for Red October'', ''Red Storm Rising'' and ''Cardinal of the Kremlin'' were set ''during'' the [[Cold War]] and therefore are not a case of this trope. All subsequent depictions in his works of [[The New Russia]] after [[The Great Politics Mess-Up]] are generally accurate, if not overly idealistic.

** ''The Sum Of All Fears'' was set during the cold war as a novel. When it was released as a movie in 2002 with Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman, the story was updated using both [[Make the Bear Angry Again]] and [[Renegade Russian]].

* Spoofed by ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'', where Russia reveals that [[The Great Politics Mess-Up]] was a sham, and dramatically returns to its Soviet ways - including the Berlin Wall popping back up from the ground and the corpse of Lenin arising and staggering around his tomb, moaning "Must crush capitalism..."

{{quote|"The Soviet Union?" I thought you guys broke up.

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** The [[Hand Wave]] is that Israel becomes something of a [[Last Fertile Region]] (or at least, much more fertile than it was before), and the Bear is just plain angry that Israel won't share the [[Applied Phlebotinum]] that made this possible. (All of this stems from the authors' interpretations of Biblical prophecies.)

* The ''Eclipse'' series by John Shirley has a resurrected Soviet Union.

** Similarly, the slow, and generally ignored, Union State (or, more superfluously, the Union State of Russia and Belarus) is a ''real life'' supranational entity intended as the framework for shared national economies, a unified judicial system, a shared parliament and, of course, a shared military command. Widely ignored in the West, and NATO, perhaps because of its sluggishness and the nonthreatening fact that its members and proposed members are all voluntary participants with either historic ties to the Russian Federation (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) or frozen conflict zones (Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia), frequently former autonomous districts who are no longer on speaking terms with newly-founded republics they were lumped with. One exception is Serbia, which has never (literally and figuratively) answered to Moscow. It's similarity to the Soviet Union is ''probably'' not a coincidence.

* Apparently [[Humongous Mecha]] and [[Black Box]] technology prevented the Soviet Union from falling in ''[[Full Metal Panic!]]''.

** According to the background information in the light novels, development of weaponized Black Technology resulted in a pan-middle eastern conflict and a civil war in China. This changed international relationships, delaying the opening of the USSR, and during this period the coup against Gorbachev was successful, resulting in his assassination and the continuation of the Soviet Union. {{spoiler|Of course, for those developing said weaponized Black Technology, this arrangement has proven to be satisfactory and '''very''' profitable...}}

* Arguably one of the first of these works is Barrett Tillman's ''[[The Sixth Battle]]'' from 1992, where a military coup overthrows the nascent Russian democracy, gets most of the former republics back into what is re-branded the Union of Eurasian Republics and then gets its allies together to invade [[The Apartheid Era|apartheid South Africa]].

* In ''[[Ender's Game]]'', Russia is mentioned frequently as being a threat, and at the end of the book they even launch a brief civil war within the IF. In later books they continue to make trouble. Although the original was written before the collapse of the Soviet Union, communism and the USSR are never mentioned, and the government is kept very vague.

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* ''The Time Traders'' by [[Andre Norton]] -- first published 1958, re-released by [[Baen Books]] forty years later -- features a conflict between the USA and the Russians over [[Time Travel]] technology. The Baen edition inserts a paragraph describing the emergence of a belligerant "Greater Russia" from the ruins of the old Soviet Union.

* The first ''[[Deus Ex]]'' computer game, set in the near future, subtly implies that the Soviet Union might have risen again when the player encounters some emails with the domain "sovnet."

* The [[Command ~~and~~ Conquer|Red Alert]] series never really let the Bear [[Time Travel|calm down much]], but [[Command ~~and~~ Conquer Red Alert 3|the latest game]] takes place in a contemporary-''looking'' world, so this trope is right at home.

* The [[Command & Conquer|Red Alert]] series never really let the Bear [[Time Travel|calm down much]], but [[Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3|the latest game]] takes place in a contemporary-''looking'' world, so this trope is right at home.

* [[Oh God, with the Verbing!|And again with the]] [[Time Travel]], [[Singularity]] never calms the Bear down either, and then has it {{spoiler|take over the world}}.

* In ''[[Canadian Bacon]]'', the executive branch of the US government ''tries'' to get Russia to fight with them again in an attempt to improve their approval ratings ([[Hilarious in Hindsight|predicting no one would]] [[Funny Aneurysm Moment|take a terrorist threat seriously]]).

* In ''[[Shattered Union]]'', Russia invades Alaska after Washington, D.C., is destroyed by [[Western Terrorists]] and the rest of the country splits into six factions, all vying for control. The hard-line Russian President Vladekov claims that Alaska should always have been a part of Russia and, since it's separate from the rest of the US, it has no business being a part of that country. Later on, it is revealed that {{spoiler|the Russian president masterminded the D.C. attack}}. It is also revealed that the Russian people are against the invasion and the military build-up and will rise up if Vladekov is sufficiently weakened by the re-unified US.