The 25 Most Memorable Communist Villains In Movies

You can always count on Hollywood to turn any real-world political adversary of the United States into villains in the film world, and from 1945-1991, Tinseltown focused squarely on America’s Cold War foes, the communists, for big-screen inspiration. Whether taking aim at Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, or the Soviet Union, for over four decades Americans had it drilled into their minds that anyone who wasn't a flag-waving, democracy-loving Yank was pure evil.

Oftentimes these commie foes were unfairly portrayed as one-dimensional villains that bore little resemblance to their real-life counterparts, but that didn’t stop the red, white, and blue propaganda machine from churning. Now, with this week's release of a Red Dawn remake, it appears we’re ready for round two against the communists. In the original 1984 action-adventure classic, Russian and Cuban forces invaded and occupied Calumet, CO, forcing local teens to become guerrilla freedom fighters. The new version finds North Koreans parachuting into Spokane, WA.

As we toast the return of the red menace on the big screen with a Molotov cocktail, Complex takes a look back at The 25 Most Memorable Communist Villains in Movies.

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Written by Jason Serafino (serafinoj1)

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Played by: Liev Schreiber

In Salt, Liev Schreiber plays Ted Winter, a.k.a. Nikolai Tarkovski, a KA sleeper agent trained and planted since childhood who is looking to ignite a war between the U.S. and the Arab world. He had spent years masquerading as a CIA agent in order to get close to the American government and its nuclear arsenal, and no one around him suspected a thing. But just as easily as turning on a light switch, Tarkovski showed his true colors and his disdain for the States.

He wipes out numerous government officials, assaults the president, and almost nukes a good chunk of the world before he’s eventually killed by fellow plant Salt as he’s about to start WWIII. That’s not a bad amount of villainy for a movie that isn’t even two hours long.

Played by: Jason Alexander

We know this movie was horrible, but we would be remiss not to include one of the all-time great Russian spies on this list, even if it is in atrocious live-action form. The original cartoon series, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, aired November 19, 1959 to June 27, 1964, during the height of the Cold War, and while Boris’ political ideology was never discussed, it was pretty much agreed that he would have to be a communist given the geo-political landscape at the time. Jason Alexander did an admirable job bringing the character to life, even if the overall quality of the film wasn’t great.

Played by: Ed O’Ross

We’re not particularly broken up over the fact that the buddy cop genre has gone the way of the buffalo over the years, yet despite the genre’s shortcomings, Red Heat, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi, featured a damn good commie bad guy. Ed O’Ross played Viktor Rostavili, a drug lord from Soviet Georgia, who was about as villainous as they come.

Most notably, he and his men escape police custody while in the U.S. by ambushing and killing the police officers charged with his detainment. He's later involved in a chaotic bus chase through the city, which ends with a four-wheeled game of chicken with a very pissed off Schwarzenegger, whose thick Austrian accent attempted to pass for a thick Russian accent.

Played by: Kevin Costner

The movie starts with his U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell embroiled in a love affair with the Secretary of Defense David Brice's (Gene Hackman) girlfriend. Things quickly unravel when the jealous Secretary learns that she's having an affair with someone and slaps her right off a balcony, accidentally killing her.

Brice covers up the killing by pinning it on the woman's lover, claiming the unknown gent is a long-rumored Russian sleeper agent named "Yuri," and ironically tasks Farrell with tracking him down. Little does anyone—including the audience—know that Farrell is indeed that KGB sleeper agent, planted in the U.S. when he was a teen. He was ordered to sleep with the Secretary's jumpoff in order to gain vital Department of Defense information from her. It's a twist no one expected, and it's an edginess rarely portrayed on screen by bland-ass Costner.

Played by: Donald Pleasence

Telefon is a bit of an underrated gem in the career of Charles Bronson, so we’re dusting off this forgotten beauty for some much-needed limelight. In the film, Bronson plays a sleeper agent for the Soviet Union who was so heavily brainwashed that he doesn’t even remember being an agent.

After the Cold War became less of a threat, the Soviets let these agents live their lives in America in peace, but one rogue KGB official, Nikolai Dalchimsky, decides to activate these sleepers in order to destroy American targets. He does this by calling each agent one by one and uttering a phrase that erases their mental conditioning and reverts them back to dangerous Soviet spies attempting to begin WWIII. He's more of a puppet master than a physical threat, but that doesn't make him any less dangerous or memorable.

Played by: Voyo Goric

Every good villain needs an even better henchman, and Sgt. Yushin was the perfect compliment to Colonel Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II. He’s completely mute, but his intimidating physical appearance is all he needs to be utterly terrifying. Unlike a lot of the people on this list, Yushin is a purely physical threat who can actually match, and possibly exceed, Rambo's brawn.

He’s 100% loyal to his ideals and the colonel, and together they both take part in the torture of Rambo that is the emotional climax of the film. Like any good foe, Yushin meets a grisly fate towards the end of the movie, as Rambo proves that the only good communist is a dead communist.

Played by: Raymond Burr

At the height of the film noir movement, as well as America’s first years in the Cold War, Walk a Crooked Mile hit theaters as an early anti-Communist film about a group of spies trying to steal secrets from a Los Angeles defense plant. Raymond Burr played the head of this group of Reds, and he spent most of his time brutalizing FBI and Scotland Yard agents who were trying to stop him. There were no redeeming qualities for Burr in this movie, and this type of black-and-white perspective on the Cold War would be the blueprint for the decades of propaganda to come.

Played by: Lotte Lenya

There is nothing more frightening than a homely communist woman charging at you with a blade hidden in her boot, so it’s no wonder why we put Rosa Klebb on this list. James Bond is usually the romancer of fine women and the adversary of evil men, but Klebb is one of the rare females to cross 007’s path who wants to see the super spy on a slab rather than a bed.

Even though she’s not overtly tied to the Soviet Union in the movie version of From Russia with Love, Klebb has ties to both SMERSH and SPECTRE in the film, which were modeled after the communist superpower without explicitly saying so. And she’s about as lethal as they come.

Played by: Richard Lynch

Most of the films on Chuck Norris’ résumé are out-and-out propaganda, and Invasion U.S.A. is a proud example of that. In the movie, Norris locks horns with a Soviet operative named Mikhail Rostov, who bands together a bunch of his communist friends and wages war on Florida. These Commies shoot up shopping malls, drive tanks through the streets, and riddle the American dream with bullets, all at the command of the psychotic Rostov.

Of course this gains the ire of Norris, who immediately comes out of retirement as a CIA officer and guns for Rostov and his comrades. Rostov was incredibly cliché and one-dimensional, yet his plan was about as ballsy as we have ever seen. No communist villains had ever dared to pull up on American soil and invade (well, not since Red Dawn a year earlier), but Rostov dreamed big and almost got away with it.

Played by: Ernest Borgnine

There is no villain archetype more devious in cinema than the dreaded Soviet double agent, and in Ice Station Zebra Ernest Borgnine played one of the best ones we’ve ever seen, Boris Vaslov. In the movie, Vaslov is the trusted Russian dude along on the mission to save the scientists working at the Drift Ice Station Zebra near the arctic. But after a series of accidents and suspicious things happen during the mission, the crew suspects that a saboteur is aboard.

While it’s strange that it takes them more than five seconds to accuse the Russian dude, he’s finally revealed and wreaks even more havoc on the mission. And that’s why you never trust the good-natured Russian guy with the devious smirk during the Cold War.

Played by: Ngoc Le

Her character doesn't have a name, but Ngoc Le’s short appearance as the young female Viet Cong sniper in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is a brilliant example of Communist villainy. She is brutal and ruthless as she guns down U.S. Marines, repeatedly wounding them to draw their buddies, who never leave a man behind, out into her line of sight. It comes as a shock to the platoon when she is revealed to be a teenage girl in her final moments. As she lays mortally wounded and dying, she begs to be put out of her misery in a scene that tears off the glamorous filter of most Hollywood war movies and shows the ugly side of combat.

Played by: Steven Berkoff

The Rambo movies aren’t known for their complex and nuanced villains, and Colonel Podovsky from Rambo II is no exception. In the movie, he is working along with the North Vietnamese in a prison camp where American troops have been held since the war. He’s an evil communist through and through, and the scene where he insidiously tortures Rambo ranks amongst the franchise's most tense. This movie hit during the tail end of the Cold War in 1985, so communist baddies were in their last few years of relevance. Thankfully Podovsky would make Stalin proud before his type disappeared.

Played by: Jeroen Krabbé

In the early James Bond movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, 007’s communist foes from the original Ian Flemming novels were usually worked for fictional evil organizations, as opposed to real-life ones like the KGB. But as time moved on, Bond started to face off against real-world communist threats, and in The Living Daylights he battled General Georgi Koskov, a former KGB agent who tries to play both sides of the Cold War for his own gain. His deception gets his communist card revoked by the film’s end, but he’s still a worthy entry to the hammer-and-sickle club.

Played by: Cate Blanchett

We all know how dreadful this fourth, and hopefully last, Indiana Jones installment was, but the film’s failures have nothing to do with Cate Blanchett, who plays a great Soviet villainess. Her thick accent and straight-cut black bangs let audiences know right away that whatever Spalko is up to, it isn't good.

A master swordswoman, Spalko was that rare combination of physicality and cold, Russian logic. Of course, she was surrounded by an aging Harrison Ford, an overmatched Shia LaBeouf, and an army of CGI gophers, so Blanchett’s performance will always get lost in a sea of mediocrity. Hopefully this list gives her the attention that she deserves.

Played by: Colin Firth

In 2011’s heady, dense spy flick Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, British Intelligence must find the identity of a Soviet spy in its midst during the height of the Cold War. After trudging through a tightly-weaved mystery, we find out that the spy is none other than Bill Haydon, one of the agency’s most trusted members. It’s not shootouts or action scenes that land Haydon on this list, it’s the cat-and-mouse game of espionage that makes him so dangerous.

Where most communist villains in movies are of the over-the-top variety, Haydon captures the atmosphere of paranoia during the Cold War in a realistic way. It’s not even until the film’s ending when you finally realize what has been going on the whole time, and it proves that deception is the most dangerous villain of all.

Played by: Gary Oldman

The Cold War was only a distant memory by the time Air Force One hit theaters in 1997, but that didn’t stop Gary Oldman from playing the leader of a Soviet nationalist terrorist organization that hijacks the commander-in-chief's plane. Though logic waves goodbye to this movie once we learn that Harrison Ford is playing the president of the United States, Oldman brings some old-school deviousness to the role of Ivan Korshunov.

This movie came out during a time when Oldman was on his way towards establishing himself as one of the best actors working in film, and the way he handled this part is brilliant. It’s an intense, terrifying role that jettisons all of the trappings of the clichéd communist villains of the ‘80s and puts a modern spin on them.

Played by: Ron O’Neal

Although he ends up softening towards the end of the movie, Colonel Ernesto Bella is still a pretty nasty commie for most of Red Dawn. When he and his Cuban troops join with Russians to invade a random town in Colorado, all hell breaks loose and the Cold War instantly becomes piping hot. Men, women, and children are killed as the civilians in the town must band together to fight off the invasion. Bella and his men are far more experienced and outmatch the town at first.

What makes Bella memorable aren't his misdeeds, but rather the fact that he actually becomes quite a sympathetic character by film’s end. He grows disillusioned with his people and this war, and helps some of the Wolverines escape his comrades. It’s an interesting and unexpected twist on a very clichéd villain type.

Played by: Ding Santos

The Deer Hunter is one of the most brilliant American films from the second half of the 20th century, and one of the most memorable and tense scenes you will ever come across is the Russian Roulette sequence in the Viet Cong prison camp where John Savage, Robert De Niro, and Christopher Walken are all staring down the business end of a loaded gun.

Among the group of unknown local actors is one insistent member of the Viet Cong who keeps screaming “Mao!” at the men in order to get them to pull the trigger faster. He’s simultaneously irritating and terrifying as the game wears on. Not even an accomplished actor, Ding Santos made the entire film with this menacing role.

Played by: Alan Arkin

In his very first film, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, Alan Arkin played one of the great communist villains of all time, Lt. Yuri Rozanov. This congenial commie is in charge of freeing a Russian spy submarine from a sandbar in New England after the Soviets get too close to the American coast. Armed with a thick accent and a mustache that would make Stalin green with envy, Arkin absolutely stole every scene he was in.

In the years since this movie hit theaters, communists were always treated as cardboard bad guys without a single funny bone in their body, and that’s why The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming still stands out. It treats the overly-serious Cold War with a humorous touch, which wins in the film and lands Arkin on this list.

Played by: Various

They’re not villains in the traditional sense, but you probably can’t find one red, white, and blue-blooded American that didn’t want the U.S. to beat the Soviets during the 1980 Olympics in hockey. The opposition wasn’t given much personality in the film version of this legendary game; however, their ideals and red uniforms were enough to get us all worked up.

Even though they had more experience and talent than the U.S., the young up-start Americans managed to squeak out the win, and this film captured the moment admirably. Nothing really made these guys evil other than the “C.C.C.P.” embroidered on their jerseys, but back during the Cold War, that’s all you needed.

Played by: Angela Lansbury

Before Angela Lansbury was known as the sweet old woman from Murder, She Wrote, she broke onto the scene as the diabolical head mistress Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate. Iselin worked for the Soviets to handle her son, who had been brainwashed into becoming a political assassin by communists during the Korean War. She’s as cold as she is British, and her prim and proper facade makes her a worthy adversary for democracy.

Voiced by: Trey Parker

Kim Jong-il was scary while he was in charge of nuclear weaponry in the real world, but he was at his most terrifying in puppet form in Team America: World Police. In the movie, the infamous communist dictator is seen providing terrorist cells with WMDs so they could attack the world—simply because they’re evil.

Though he had hair and trademark glasses like the real deal, we don’t think Kim Jong-il ever spontaneously broke out into song about Alec Baldwin or had a fascination with Matt Damon in real life. But aside from a few historical inaccuracies, we much rather this version of Jong-il to his real world counterpart simply because this one would toss subordinates into a shark tank if they failed him.

Voiced by: Maurice Denham

In the original Animal Farm novel by George Orwell, the pig Napoleon was based on Soviet icon Joseph Stalin, so when the story made its way to the big screen in animated form, it's only logical that this swine became one of the most famous cinematic commies. After taking over the farm from the humans, Napoleon placed himself and a select group of other pigs in charge and declared “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

When Napoleon’s rule began, it’s with the promise of peace and prosperity for all, but it soon devolved into a dictatorship as the pigs grew fat off of the hard work of others. This is still one of the only movies to take the communist ideology to task, as opposed to just making them generic villains.

Played by: Peter Bull

Pretty much everybody is a villain in Dr. Strangelove, but the most memorable commie of the bunch is Alexie de Sadeski, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S. In the movie, Sadeski acts as an intermediary between the U.S. president and the Soviet premier as the two nations attempt to diffuse total nuclear annihilation, but Stanley Kubrick’s legendary black comedy opts to shrug off logic and embrace the insane.

Sadeski is best known for being the beefy, monotone background character as Peter Sellers chews up the scenery in his brilliant multiple roles. And despite his relative silence, he is the ultimate straight man for the madness going on around him. His standout scene came during the scuffle he has with George C. Scott, which leads Peter Sellers to exclaim “Gentleman! You can’t fight in here. This is a war room.”

Played by: Dolph Lundgren

Is there any character in the history of cinema that typifies America’s anti-communist feelings more than Ivan Drago? The dude was an emotionless wall of impenetrable muscle backed up by Soviet science who wasn’t just pleased with knocking his opponents out in the boxing ring; he wanted to kill them. Of course, Drago didn’t earn his size and strength legitimately—he was seen receiving injections of what appeared to be steroids in the movie, which led audiences to believe that he was basically a science experiment that the Soviet Union used to flex its muscle on the world stage.

Rocky, on the other hand, was 100% American-made muscle, who worked out and dieted vigorously, earning his glory without resorting to artificial means. There is no way to deny that bit of propaganda. But Drago’s Soviet physique couldn't help him from getting pounded by Rocky in true red, white, and blue fashion, in what amounted to America’s most impressive feat of the entire Cold War.