Basic Trope: Communist characters used as villains.
- Straight: General Khlebosupov is a paranoid Jerkass who mistreats his underlings and plots to start World War III — and it's up to Agent Bob to stop him.
- Exaggerated:
- General Khlebosupov and all his friends are essentially Commie Nazis.
- Everyone in the Soviet bloc, down to the last man, woman, and child, is a deranged Communist fanatic ready to take and carry out any orders, no matter how terrible.
- Downplayed:
- General Khlebosupov and his colleagues are loyal to the Soviet ideal of better living for the working class, but believe that armed confrontation over it is inevitable.
- Despite being portrayed as villains, General Khlebosupov and his clique are at worst, A Lighter Shade of Black compared to their own enemies like the morally bankrupt and tunnel-visioned corporate executives, deluded and arrogant white supremacists, the Nazis, and reactionaries with outdated beliefs willing to kill if it means it keeps the status quo that kept them in power.
- Justified:
- General Khlebosupov is a head of the military in a state that's famous for its repressive nature even compared to their Eastern Bloc allies.
- General Khlebosupov is in command of one of the worst Gulags in Soviet history.
- The story takes place during the reign of Lenin's Red Terror, the Khmer Rouge, Stalin's Purges, the Holodomor included, the Great Leap Forward, China's modern-day oppression of ethnic minorities, the Hue Massacre, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba, Central/South American left-wing guerilla terrorist attacks, North Korea's totalitarian police state, or another real-life Communist atrocity.
- General Khlebosupov has made a lot of enemies and he has to be paranoid and be willing to make an example of his enemies (actual or perceived) just to survive. He is also aware that if if he fucks up EVEN ONCE, the he's the one who gets sent to The Gulag or executed.
- Inverted:
- Subverted:
- Khlebosupov and his colleagues are imagined to be Dirty Communists in the West, but when Agent Bob meets them, they turn out to be okay people.
- After a major snafu in the espionage world, Bob's agency immediately suspects Khlebosupov, but when Bob contacts him and demands to know what his scheme is this time, he proves it wasn't his fault.
- The Communists are the bad guys, but they are Noble Demons and/or Well-Intentioned Extremists, with the entire conflict just being Good Versus Good as two utopian nations ultimately can't share the same space.
- Alice is introduced as a "hardline communist", but when the protagonists meet her, she's a sweet, innocent, kind and always smiling sweetheart who's maybe a bit of a Granola Girl but is nothing like the way they described her, even listening to their political views without judging them.
- It is explicitly pointed out that Khlebosupov's ideology is actually nothing like Marxist communism. He's a power-hungry psycho who pretends to support communism because he thinks the communists will win.
- "But it wasn't real communism!!!"
- Double Subverted:
- At first, that is. In fact, they are at best Affably Evil, and will gladly kill and even torture people in the name of expansion and more power.
- However, he is lying, and the disturbance in espionage circles was caused by his False Flag Operation.
- The Communists with good-alignment morality are killed and/or detained to gulags during political purges. Those lucky enough to escape defect to the Capitalist United States.
- The Communists may have good intentions, and deny that Khlebosupov was a true communist, but when they take power, a similar outcome takes place because of Communism’s failure as an ideology.
- Alice then starts talking about her beliefs, denying the Holodomor, praising Stalin and Mao, even praising North Korea and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, all while speaking in a sweet, gentle voice and never once breaking her smile, which makes it all the more horrifying. Though she draws the line at Pol Pot and Ne Win, she still manages to downplay their atrocities.
- It's then suggested that this is just the inevitable product of communist ideology.
- "...yeah, it was real communism".
- Parodied:
- General Khlebosupov and his cronies have abandoned personal hygiene because of soap shortages, making them literally "Dirty Communists".
- The Communists attack Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. on Christmas Eve, with an entire army of Snowlems under the command of General Winter, and it's Agent Bob's job to stop them.
- There's a Communist takeover of the United States. To abolish private property, the new regime steals candy from babies and throws kids toys on roofs.
- The Communists are mostly composed of left-leaning upper-middle-class college kids that often make senseless protests about causes they know nothing about. They constantly lecture others about how they're "part of the system" while buying the most expensive accessories with communist imagery and ranting on Reddit or Twitter about how random people are fascists. They're not evil, just obnoxious and insufferable.
- Zig-Zagged:
- The story concerns a conflict between two Communist powers: the Workers of the World Alliance, which averts this trope, and the Vanguard Socialist State, which tries to hide its nature under cheery propaganda, but ultimately plays the trope disgustingly straight.
- Agent Bob shows Alice incontrovertible proof that the Soviet Union, North Korea, East Germany, Red China, and the other Communist countries were/are really repressive places with bad living standards. She can't deny the evidence and becomes a pro-Capitalist democrat, but then she becomes a more authoritarian capitalist ... and then she comes back around to more democratic socialism...
- Averted:
- The story uses Western Terrorists backed by Corrupt Corporate Executives as the primary antagonists, with no Communists in sight.
- There is a single supporting character who is a Communist and they do not cause the anti-Communist protagonist any trouble, nor vice versa.
- A country is mentioned to have a Communist government, but no more details are offered vis-Ã -vis its human rights record.
- Enforced:
- The story is a Spy Drama written by a citizen of the United States or an allied nation at the peak of the Cold War. Who else could be a main villain in this case?
- The story is a documentary about any communist dictator, written by a defector whose entire family died in their, so nobody can expect it to paint Communism or Communists in a positive light.
- The story is told by someone who fled a communist country due to harsh conditions and brutal oppression. He's probably not going to have good things to say about his homeland.
- Lampshaded: "Didn't you have enough ideologically motivated wrongdoings for today, General?" "KONESCHNO NYET!"note
- Invoked: General Khlebosupov is a hardliner jerk who honestly believes that an iron-fisted dictatorship is the best way to run things, holds up Stalin and Mao as great role models, and thus tries to make the repressive Communist regime even more horrible to keep people in line.
- Exploited: A Nazi by Any Other Name, or some other right-winger who aspires to govern as a totalitarian, uses the fear of communists to gain political power and establish their own regime.
- Defied: Bob goes back in time to warn Karl Marx about the suffering and tyranny his Communist Manifesto will inspire some people to create. In order to prevent the atrocities of Stalin, Mao, and their ilk, Marx goes out of his way to write in all his Author Tracts that the proletariat's uprising MUST be completely and utterly non-violent.
- Discussed:Spy Chief Ted: Darn ... these Commies are always up to no good. You teach them a lesson, Agent Bob.Agent Bob: Will do.
- Conversed: "And again, we see the Commies as the bad guys. Don't the filmmakers know that the Cold War is over?"
- Implied: During the story itself, no Communists appear, but Agent Bob makes no secret of his distaste for them, and it's hinted throughout the plot to be wholly justified.
- Deconstructed:
- The work goes out of its way to show that people in Eastern and Western camps are really no different after all.
- General Khlebosupov is an unrepentantly evil bigwig in the Soviet military apparatus ... except he's a Straw Hypocrite whose sole care is for his own power and who has never thought for a second about anything Karl Marx wrote. Most of his compatriots don't mind if he goes too far in his world domination schemes and Agent Bob offs him.
- Reconstructed:
- However, this does not make Communist regimes any less repressive, despite being staffed by normal people.
- The villains like Khlebosupov are in fact The Remnant or a Renegade Splinter Faction that consistently threatens world stability and the reputation, if not outright existence of less oppressive Communist countries, resulting in the entire world gladly teaming up to fight the Dirty Communists no matter how many times they show up.
- Played for Laughs: The Communists are guilty of nothing more than tentative and nervous attempts at evil, but they're still treated like Big Bads.
- Played for Drama:
- The Communists killed Bob's family, his Love Interest Alice, and many of his closest friends.
- The Communists have captured Bob and are letting him worry himself sick about what they'll do to him...
- Played for Horror: ...We see what the Communists do to Bob, not to mention their own people, in excruciating detail.
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