About 20 years ago Hollywood released a film called "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" Good-natured, whimsical, and at times outrageously funny, the film depicts a Soviet boat accidentally landing on a beach somewhere in New England, thus causing no end of anxiety among the local inhabitants. But for all its humor, the film hit a genuinely raw nerve. For several decades, millions of Americans were transfixed by the image of a wicked enemy threatening the United States and out to establish its hegemony over the world.


Indeed, the film's title encapsulated the spirit of the Cold War, the idea that the Soviet Union was intrinsically an expansionist power, its appetite for world conquest sharpened and enshrined by official dogma. Saner minds urged that the danger should not be overblown. Yet attempts at more nuanced assessments of the nature of the Soviet state and its international behavior would often cause suspicion if not paranoid hostility. And so simplistic notions prevailed.


The Cold War is over, the map of the world has changed almost beyond recognition, yesterday's verities have turned into tawdry farces, but still the image of "The Russians Are Coming!" endures. The fears of a lifetime are as strong as, if not stronger than vested beliefs. As a result many Americans have come to see Russia as the reincarnation of their old image of the Soviet Union: Every expression of Russian nationalism is equated with bellicose chauvinism; every foreign policy move that is not entirely in accord with Western policies is seized upon as evidence that the old, dangerous appetites are still there, waiting to be let loose.


The lunatic antics of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the fulminations of Communists are regularly described in the Western press as a serious menace. Any annoyance -- however legitimate -- voiced by the Russian government over the treatment of Russians in Latvia or Estonia, any disagreement between Moscow and Washington about Serbia -- however justifiable -- is not examined on its merits, but taken as proof that Russia is following the old Soviet "imperialist" path.


Some Russian observers regard the recent U.S. Congress resolution threatening to withhold economic help from Russia as a typically sleazy contest between Republicans and Democrats for popular support. This is, of course, true to an extent, but at bottom the resolution reflects the still popular notion that plus ?a change, plus c'est la m?me chose.


The attitude is not new. It came to the fore with the advent of perestroika and glasnost, which were regarded by many Westerners as a typical "Communist trick," a hoax, or sheer cosmetics. "Gorby-mania" vied with the assumption that the new first secretary was simply a clever Communist bent on preserving the Communist system.


Yeltsin's rise to power was first greeted with enthusiasm, particularly when he lauded capitalism and found God. He could do nothing wrong. Once he and Andrei Kozyrev began to fashion a more Russia-oriented foreign policy (which incidentally predated the rise of Zhirinovsky), old hackles began to rise.


Unreconstructed "cold-warriors," neo-conservative gurus such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, Russian ?migr?s such as Vladimir Bukovsky, who regards all Western Sovietology as nothing but pro-Soviet "garbage," parti pris historians such as Richard Pipes and Martin Malia and dyed-in-the-wool columnists like the former editor of The New York Times, Abe Rosenthal, have been the first to ring the tocsin. But their message strikes a chord.


This attitude may explain why Alexander Solzhenitsyn, though read even less in the United States than in Russia, is still regarded there as an anti-Communist hero. Or why a vulgar fraud such as "Special Tasks," by the old KGB killer Pavel Sudoplatov and two American journalists, Jerrold and Leona Schecter, which accuses eminent scientists such as the late J. Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr of having passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, at first met with a respectable reception in the United States. The prestigious McNeill-Lehrer television program at first allowed the Schecters to spin their prevarications without any rebuttal, and Robert Conquest, author of "The Great Terror," called the book "the most sensational and in many ways the most informative autobiography ever to emerge from the Stalinist milieu."


It also explains why efforts to increase economic ties between Ukraine and Russia are often interpreted as yet one more move to incorporate Ukraine into Russia. The idea that the destruction of the U.S.S.R. in December 1991 was possibly a tragedy as much for Ukraine as for Russia is usually given short shrift.


We must not overstate: By and large the alarmists are in a minority. Their shrill warnings have not prevented Western governments from inviting Russia to cooperate with the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations and with NATO's "Partnership for Peace." Nor must one dismiss the potential danger of extreme nationalism, or of a new authoritarianism.


The recent report by the Russian Federation's Commission on Human Rights, listing shocking violations of human rights under the Yeltsin regime, illustrates the second possibility.


But this does not amount to the emergence of a new anti-Western imperialism. The old cry of "The Russians are coming!" then, should be put to rest.


The Russians are not coming except, perhaps, to launder their money.





Abraham Brumberg writes frequently on Russian and East European affairs for The New York Review of Books, The (London) Times Literary Supplement, and other American and British publications. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.