Russian stereotypes on American television?

On Monday night, I watched the latest episode of Heroes, The Line. In it, Noah Bennett, a.k.a. Horn-Rimmed Glasses, went to Odessa, Ukraine, to hunt down his old mentor, Ivan. He was after some paintings and, indirectly, information about The Company, the group that, for lack of a better word, hunts people with special powers.

The plot of the Heroes episode is largely unimportant for what I’m wanting to write about in this post, other than the fact that in the episode, Ivan was a bad guy. He had trained Bennett to work for The Company, and indeed, Ivan was still being employed by The Company, until Bennet blew his head off. Ivan was: of Slavic ancestry (which, for most Americans, might as well be Russian), and a bad guy. It’s peculiar how often this combo pops up in American television.

When I started thinking about this, I tried to conjure up as many instances in my memory of television shows where a Russian (or someone from a former USSR country) appeared as a character. While I’m sad to say I can’t come up with any specific examples, I know I’ve seen a fair number of Russian characters in television shows over the years - usually in things like Law and Order (and its offshoots), Criminal Minds, etc. - and all of them were dirty in some manner or another. Killers, drug dealers, mob lords - if they were Slavic, they were trouble.

Does any of this sound familiar to American television watchers (or non-Americans who regularly watch our shows), or have I just imagined this?

If I’ve not imagined this, it begs the question: why? Why have I never seen a good Russian / Slavic person in an American T.V. show? Does it hearken back to when Americans hated Russians because of communism and the Cold War, and the negative view of the people as a whole has continued to this day? Do Russians just make really good bad characters?

What gives?