The new Steven Spielberg thriller Bridge of Spies is based on a key event during the Cold War. This was a period when paranoia ran from the political elites to the ordinary US citizen and often surfaced in American popular culture. It had a long reach, turning up everywhere from comic books to movies.  The first US “red scare” dates back to the early 20th century and the Russian Revolution. A revolutionary government, adamantly opposed to capitalism and with global ambitions, was seen as dangerously likely to trigger strikes and unrest in the US heartland. Communism was regarded as fundamentally antithetical to the American way of life.  The fear receded during the Second World War, when the Soviet Union was a military ally against Nazism, but returned with renewed force after the war ended.  It took a prominent place in the US educational system when schoolchildren were shown films of nuclear explosions and encouraged to “duck and cover” – hide under desks – to escape the effects.  Indoctrination grew quickly from Bert the Turtle, a friendly cartoon adviser, to the bubblegum cards of the Children’s Crusade Against Communism in 1951 and home economics lessons in how to furnish a bomb shelter. It may now seem absurd, but there was little appetite for the more reasoned approaches proposed by some.  Hollywood picked up the theme in adult movies, from I Married a Communist to The Red Menace in 1949. Cold War themes cropped up in metaphorical form in science fiction, such as The Thing from Another World in 1951.  Magazine and newspaper articles – the main source of information while television was in its infancy – carried lurid titles such as “I don’t want my children to grow up in Soviet Russia” or “I learned about Communism the hard way”.  There is a big difference between propaganda and paranoia, but in the fevered atmosphere of the time the transition was easy. Events took a more vicious turn with the onset of the McCarthyite witch-hunts in 1950. Senator Joseph McCarthy made allegations of widespread communist subversion in the US, from the army to the government.  His claims were investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, first created in 1938 to counter Nazism. Communism had gained its share of pre-war US adherents, so McCarthy’s activities gained a foothold. He turned the spotlight on the movie industry and produced the Hollywood blacklist, naming ten leading figures in the industry.  They included Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson and Orson Welles. Many more were subpoenaed as witnesses.  The accused either left the country or the industry, or worked on under pseudonyms. McCarthy became increasingly unpopular for his smear tactics, seen as undermining democracy, and died in 1957.  In the Soviet sphere, propaganda played a different role. In a heavily censored society where open debate was suppressed, it was less important as a tool to influence domestic opinion.  The official line was that Soviet achievements – developing the Bomb and the space race – were a source of pride. America was the aggressor; the motherland must be defended.  A false sense of inevitability inherent in Marxism-Leninism about the eventual triumph of socialism provided an equally illusory sense of security. A nuclear war would be regrettable but nothing could stop the march of history. The KGB’s enormous propaganda budget was mostly spent abroad on trying to manipulate Western protest and front organisations.  A few early Soviet dissidents – Ginzburg, Galanskov, Daniel and Sinayavsky – were imprisoned by the late Sixties as illegal samizdat publishing got under way. It proved persistent.  Yet it was not until later that Soviet dissidence played a key role in Cold War perceptions. And by that time, the initial wave of extreme Cold War paranoia had moved on.  • Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, is released in UK cinemas on 26 November. Find out more at facebook.com/BridgeOfSpiesUK
Paranoia was common during the Cold War – the natural offspring of propaganda, ignorance, fear and secrecy. Find out how a 40-year stand-off between superpowers put the US on edge