Make The Bear Angry Again - Television Tropes & Idioms

"The Red Bear has awoken. And the world will see his might."
—World in Conflict: Soviet Assault trailer

With The Great Politics Mess-Up, Russia lost some of its villain status, so writers were stuck on how to find evil Russians with Mnogo Nukes on hand. Because, frankly, there's no one else with cruise missile subs and carriers for the US to fight.

There are two solutions: Renegade Russian, or Make The Bear Angry Again.

The latter is where Russia stays in its authoritarian military democracy, or ditches that silly "democracy" bit altogether, and grows increasingly aggressive, possibly reabsorbing the post-Soviet states as some sort of a Rebuilt Soviet Union, Eurasian Empire or something equally scary sounding. This allows Russia to start attacking places again and being generally assertive. Probably will not involve actual bears, unless Russia decides to get serious this time. (Or not.)

More or less Truth in Television: while diplomatic relations between United States and Russia did improve after the end of the Cold War, antagonism still exists between the said two countries. It should be noted that things gotten a bit more sour when Vladimir Putin came into play.

This trope is also played with in some Russian fiction; it's close to playing it straight, but of course it's not viewed as a bad thing.

Examples

Dale Brown- where Russia launches nukes at the USA.
The Covert One novel The Moscow Vector.
Pretty much every other computer game and novel with a modern warfare setting (Tom Clancy produces examples of both).
- Except that The Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Rising and Cardinal of the Kremlin were set during the Cold War and therefore are not a case of this trope. All subsequent depictions in his works of The New Russia after The Great Politics Mess-Up are generally accurate, if not overly idealistic.
- The Sum Of All Fears was set during the cold war as a novel. When it was released as a movie in 2002 with Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman, the story was updated using both Make The Bear Angry Again and Renegade Russian.
Spoofed by The Simpsons, where Russia reveals that The Great Politics Mess-Up was a sham, and dramatically returns to its Soviet ways - including the Berlin Wall popping back up from the ground and the corpse of Lenin arising and staggering around his tomb, moaning "Must crush capitalism..."
"The Soviet Union?" I thought you guys broke up.
Yes, Zat's vat ve vanted you to think! [Evil Laugh]
Something happens in the backstory to the Left Behind series (first book written and published in 1995) to get Russia to attack Israel. Your guess is as good as ours as to exactly what.
- Just to pound in how much of a stretch that would be, in Real Life the relations between both countries improved to the point that visa restrictions were removed between them. Compare and contrast that with the protracted visa war between Russia and European Union, not to mention US, in which all sides seemingly try to make their opponents' travelers more miserable.
- The Hand Wave is that Israel becomes something of a Last Fertile Region (or at least, much more fertile than it was before), and the Bear is just plain angry that Israel won't share the Applied Phlebotinum that made this possible. (All of this stems from the authors' interpretations of Biblical prophecies.)
The Eclipse series by John Shirley has a resurrected Soviet Union.
- Similarly, the slow, and generally ignored, Union State (or, more superfluously, the Union State of Russia and Belarus) is a real life supranational entity intended as the framework for shared national economies, a unified judicial system, a shared parliament and, of course, a shared military command. Widely ignored in the West, and NATO, perhaps because of its sluggishness and the nonthreatening fact that its members and proposed members are all voluntary participants with either historic ties to the Russian Federation (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) or frozen conflict zones (Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia), frequently former autonomous districts who are no longer on speaking terms with newly-founded republics they were lumped with. One exception is Serbia, which has never (literally and figuratively) answered to Moscow. It's similarity to the Soviet Union is probably not a coincidence.
Apparently Humongous Mecha and Black Box technology prevented the Soviet Union from falling in Full Metal Panic!.
- According to the background information in the light novels, development of weaponized Black Technology resulted in a pan-middle eastern conflict and a civil war in China. This changed international relationships, delaying the opening of the USSR, and during this period the coup against Gorbachev was successful, resulting in his assassination and the continuation of the Soviet Union. Of course, for those developing said weaponized Black Technology, this arrangement has proven to be satisfactory and very profitable...
Arguably one of the first of these works is Barrett Tillman's The Sixth Battle from 1992, where a military coup overthrows the nascent Russian democracy, gets most of the former republics back into what is re-branded the Union of Eurasian Republics and then gets its allies together to invade apartheid South Africa.
In Ender's Game, Russia is mentioned frequently as being a threat, and at the end of the book they even launch a brief civil war within the IF. In later books they continue to make trouble. Although the original was written before the collapse of the Soviet Union, communism and the USSR are never mentioned, and the government is kept very vague.
- Its referred to as The Second Warsaw Pact composed of every state that was in the Soviet Union and the previous Warsaw Pact plus a couple more states (implied that it has some influence all the way up to the Netherlands).
World in Conflict is set in an Alternate History, where USSR launches an attack on US and Western Europe in 1989 (in Real Life, the final, milder part of the Cold War), with China later joining the party (no, not the Party)*
An extreme stretch, given that Russia and China are not on friendly terms, and in fact tend to despise each other
.
In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a False Flag Operation by an international terrorist prompts Russia (which has already been taken over by hardline Ultranationalists) to launch a retaliatory assault on the US.
The Russian-Georgian War fought in ~~Ghost Recon~~2008.
The Time Traders by Andre Norton — first published 1958, re-released by Baen Books forty years later — features a conflict between the USA and the Russians over Time Travel technology. The Baen edition inserts a paragraph describing the emergence of a belligerant "Greater Russia" from the ruins of the old Soviet Union.
The first Deus Ex computer game, set in the near future, subtly implies that the Soviet Union might have risen again when the player encounters some emails with the domain "sovnet."
The Red Alert series never really let the Bear calm down much, but the latest game takes place in a contemporary-looking world, so this trope is right at home.
And again with the Time Travel, Singularity never calms the Bear down either, and then has it take over the world.
In Canadian Bacon, the executive branch of the US government tries to get Russia to fight with them again in an attempt to improve their approval ratings (predicting no one would take a terrorist threat seriously).
In Shattered Union, Russia invades Alaska after Washington, D.C., is destroyed by Western Terrorists and the rest of the country splits into six factions, all vying for control. The hard-line Russian President Vladekov claims that Alaska should always have been a part of Russia and, since it's separate from the rest of the US, it has no business being a part of that country. Later on, it is revealed that the Russian president masterminded the D.C. attack. It is also revealed that the Russian people are against the invasion and the military build-up and will rise up if Vladekov is sufficiently weakened by the re-unified US.
Subverted in Fyodor Berezin's Incoming Cataclysm, where it is initially assumed that Russia may have gone back to its Soviet days, when an American base is destroyed by forces bearing the hammer-and-sickle red star. However, it is eventually determined that the attackers are from a parallel world where the Soviet Union is the dominant power. The rest of the novel is a major naval battle between our world's American carrier group and the other world's Soviet carrier group (the latter didn't really exist in Real Life). The parallel Soviets assume they're fighting their Americans (a pretty common occurance for them), while most of the American servicemen (except for the top brass) assume they're fighting some new unknown threat that uses Soviet symbology. Both sides use technology unknown (or seen as archaic) to the other, such as satellites and stealth ships for the Americans and ground effect planes and battleships for the Soviets. Both sides lose their supercarriers, which causes the Soviet forces to return to their native dimension (the rift was formed by the presence of active nuclear reactors).
Several games in the Battlefield series set in the modern era seem to go with this approach, pitting the Russians against the US. Notable examples include the Bad Company games, Battlefield Play 4 Free, and Battlefield 3.
The backstory of the StarFight games has Russia undergo another revolution on September 11, 2012 (Note: this is an old game, so they had no way of knowing 9/11 would become an infamous date). A year later, the Soviet States of Russia are formed, starting a new Cold War. This time, it's with the UN, which has, essentially, become a single entity. After the discovery of FTL Travel, UN forms the UNSF and uses it to annex the SSR. The remaining Soviet leadership flees Earth for Mezen Prime, an Earth-like world found and settled by SSR, reforming the SSR into the Soviet States of Mezen. Later, the UNSF and SSM fight several wars, resulting in an AI revolt which bombs Earth back into the Stone Age and turns Mezen Prime uninhabitable.
The game Vanquish has the Russians returning to a militaristic country, at odds with the rest of world, after a Military coup. This of course leads to them attacking the 51st American state; IN SPACE!!
In Earth 2140 and its sequels, the Eurasian Dynasty was formed after World War Three has destroyed all the old nation-states in the mid-21st century. A Russian Army colonel leads his remaining men from their bunker East into what used to be Mongolia, where they encounter the Khans, a nomadic tribe. Joining with them, the colonel proceeds to start conquering what's left of civilization in Europe and Asia. He also marries into the tribe, changes his name, and forms his own dynasty, which persists for another century. By the time of the ill-fated Dynasty's war with the United Civilized States, ED now controls all of Europe, Asia, and Africa using cyborg armies and military equipment that has not changed since the last war (and if that means going up against Humongous Mecha with old-fashioned tanks, so be it). They are the least technological faction in the games, but can easily out-produce the others, preferring the We Have Reserves approach.
- According to the Earth 2160 intro, Russia went communist again in 2008. Troop movements followed, culminating in a nuclear strike against an (presumably) American naval battle group. After a bit, Washington, D.C., is leveled by a nuke. Then It Got Worse. There may be some Dis Continuity here, as the manual for Earth 2150 claims that the nuclear war started in the 2040s.
This is pretty much what happens in Tom Clancy's End War. Awash with money and resources after a catastrophic energy crisis, the Russians decide to make themselves the world's only superpower. They even spark World War III by turning the United States and European Federation against each other.