The agitational task of [Cold War] films was to represent yesterday’s ally in the anti-fascist struggle as the enemy. … The transformation of recent allies…was achieved in terms of plot through secret links between Americans (class enemies, naturally, like generals, senators, businessmen or diplomats) and Nazis. The identification of the Americans with the Nazis was the only “secret ingredient” of the whole package of Cold War films, while in Conspiracy of the Doomed, East European Social-Democrats were actually equated with the Americans, as if with absolute evil. However, … the “negative” American was inevitably contrasted with the “simple” American who, if he was not actually a Communist, was at least a sympathizer. … [The] only function of the “simple” American…was to believe in the Soviet Union. He was not a personality in his own right but a delegated representative of the people (an “idealised role”). In Conspiracy of the Doomed there are four such representatives and, even though they are all played by actors who were popular – Pavel Kadochnikov, Vladimir Druzhinikov, Rostislav Plyatt and Maxim Strauch, the roles still remained “idealised”. Naturally, in this Socialist Realist typological structure almost everybody who was not “one of us” was in practice depicted as an “enemy of the people”, and vice versa. The function of the “wrecker” could be played, according to Plyatt, by a senator or an American ambassador in an Eastern European country, not to mention a general. But it was only on the periphery of the action that a representative of the CIA as a professional intelligence officer appeared. The genre structure of these films was therefore considerably weakened: the spy intrigue provided the framework for the plot rather than motivating the action. It was for this reason that the authors of a film willingly gave spy roles to women: it allowed them to enliven the action with unexpected plot twists and striking outfits…

Maya Turovskaya, “Soviet Films of the Cold War”, in Richard Taylor, Derek Spring, eds., Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (Rout- ledge, 1993)