Russian Bear

"Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear and have their heads crushed like rotten apples."

—Duke of Orléans, Henry V

The Russian Bear is one of the most well-known and recognized animal stereotypes in modern culture. This association exists in part because of the presence of large numbers of wild bears in the Russian wilderness, and in part because of popularized parallels between the physical might and power of the animal and that of the various incarnations of the Russian state. Depending on the context, this may have varyingly positive and negative connotations. During the Cold War in particular, American media tended to emphasize the more negative portrayals of bears as ferocious and dangerous predators in these contexts.

Generally, these bears are always brown-furred specimens modeled after the Eurasian brown bear. More rarely, they may be based on white-furred polar bears, which also inhabit northern Russia and Siberia.

In humorous or fantastical works, Russian or Russian Fantasy Counterpart Culture characters and armies may be seen using bears as mounts or war animals. In a World of Funny Animals, Russian characters are often depicted as bears. On some occasions, other Slavic nations may also be associated with bears as well, in a case of Small Reference Pools.

A Sub-Trope of National Animal Stereotypes. Compare American Eagle and Kangaroos Represent Australia, contrast Nations as People. Make the Bear Angry Again is named after this motif. If a Russian character is themself portrayed as a bear, they'll usually be a Husky Russkie.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In the 1984 re-election campaign for Ronald Reagan, one TV commercial consisted primarily of video footage of a bear in the woods. A narrator says things like "Some say the bear is tame, others say it's vicious and dangerous." He concludes that, since we don't know for sure, we need to be just as strong. No mention of the cold war was included, but it became obvious that the ad refers to the Soviet Union.
• The European line of Vodka Pushkin features a bear in its logo◊.

Animation

• The most internationally well known modern animated series from Russia? Well, Masha and the Bear. Though here the bear in question is a Gentle Giant and a bit of a goofball.
• In Pleasant Goat Fun Class: Travel Around the World episode 2, the gang goes to Russia and meets a strong bear man who helps them to retrieve a Russian doll that's frozen in the water.
• Squirrel and Hedgehog: Russians are represented as bears, and are the unreliable allies of the heroic North Korean squirrels and hedgehogs against the villainous South Korean rats, Japanese weasels, and American wolves and foxes.

Anime & Manga

• Biomega: Kozlov is a Russian scientist who had his mind uploaded into a bear.
• Cat Shit One: In the story's World of Funny Animals, Soviet Russians are portrayed as bears.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 00: Sergei Smirnov is referred to as the "Wild Bear of Russia".
• Yasuke: Nikita is a Russian were-bear.

Comic Books

• Blacksad: In the album Red Soul, a Russian émigré artist is depicted as an old brown bear.
• The Cartoon History of the Modern World: Russia in the late 19th century is shown as a menacing bear from the Japanese point of view.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Mighty Avengers (2013): The Bear is a Russian were-bear. She was created in Tunguska by a group of sorcerers called the Deathwalkers using a ritual that would birth a creature that was part human and part animal.
  • Mikhail Uriokovitch Ursus, also known as Ursa Major, is a mutant who can transform into a bear. He's traditionally a member of the Winter Guard, Russia's counterpart to the Avengers. When the Guard are portrayed as a Similar Squad to the Avengers, he's been the counterpart to the Beast and the Hulk.
• In the Ace the Bat-Hound story Hounded in Batman: Urban Legends, one of Ace's companions is a bear called Ursa who used to be the pet/mook-disposal of a boss in Gotham's Russian mob. Said boss also asks one of his mooks if he knows why Russia is symbolised by the bear, and when the mook suggests it's because bears are strong, replies that on the contrary, it started out as an absurdist joke making Russia look foolish. But they made it into a symbol of strength, because that's what Russia does.

Films — Animation

• Bartok the Magnificent: Bartok's best friend Zozi is a talking bear which makes a living by entering the scenery as a rabid beast and getting defeated every single time by his business partner. Unlike most examples, he is a Genius Bruiser and civilized enough to the point he could almost be considered a Man of Wealth and Taste. As a nod to Slavic folklore, he also plays the role of both The Lancer and Big Fun, though his importance to the plot is limited to a few key scenes.
• Sing: Mike the mouse is in debt of a trio of Russian-accented gangster brown bears who keep pursuing him over the course of the movie.
• Zootopia: There's a polar bear character with the Russian-sounding name Koslov. He was originally intended to be a more prominent character, head of a Russian-type mafia, complete with the accent, but in the final film, he's a non-speaking henchman of the Italian-accented mafioso Arctic shrew Mr. Big. Other polar bear mobsters wear attire stereotypical of Russian mobsters, like tracksuits and golden chains.

Films — Live-Action

• The Charge of the Light Brigade: The animated segments depict Imperial Russia as a bear menacing Turkey (which is depicted as a turkey, then as a beautiful damsel). The English lion defeats it by siccing bulldogs at it. A later segment shows John Bull taming the Russian bear and making it dance.
• The aptly named Ursus from Guardians (2017) had Cold War scientists grant him the superhuman ability to transform into a bear, either fully or as a humanoid hybrid.

Literature

• The Bear and the Dragon revolves around a war about to break out between China and the USS. The title is a reference to the animal stereotypes of each respective nation, with the bear representing Russia and the dragon representing China.
• Gorky Park: Discussed in Polar Star. The protagonist notes that, while foreigners often picture Russians as lumbering bears, Russian men often think of themselves as wolves.
• I Funny: The trope is discussed when Jamie says that a Russian customer laughs "like a happy bear".
• Leviathan: The signature Bioweapon Beasts used by the Russian Empire are immense, ferocious war bears.

Live-Action TV

• During the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Channel 4 repeatedly broadcast "Gay Mountain", a short pseudo-advertisement mocking the homophobic policies of the Russian government. A stout, bearded man begins singing a parody of the Russian national anthem, before stripping down to his underwear and revealing himself to be a "bear" in the gay sense, turning the song into a disco number about gay liberation. The singer was Fred Bear of the gay burlesque troup Bearlesque.
• The Great: After her new husband Peter gives her a pet bear, Catherine has a dream about a bear embracing her. Her handmaiden Marial convinces her that this is a meaningful dream, telling her that she may be destined to be a great ruler of Russia.
• The History Channel ran a series titled The Eagle and the Bear about American and Soviet actions during the Cold War.

Music

• Basement Jaxx 2006 single "Take Me Back to Your House" featuring Canadian singer Martina Sorbara, features a lot of Russian NationalStereotype including That Russian Squat Dance, but there are also bears too, but in keeping with the Lighter and Softer feel the video has, these are dancing bears.
• P.D.Q. Bach's "Sonata de Circo" for steam calliope has a movement titled "Smokski the Russian Bear."

Roleplay

• Darwin's Soldiers: Piotr Kozlov is a hulking anthropomorphic Siberian brown bear.

Sports

• Misha the Bear was the official mascot for the 1980 Summer Olympics hosted by the Soviet Union. As if in response, the U.S.A. chose an eagle as their official mascot when they hosted the next Summer Olympics in 1984.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer Fantasy Battle: Kislev, a country based on medieval Russia, the Kievan Rus' and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, is heavily associated with bears and bear imagery. Its patron deity is Ursun, the god of bears and strength, it makes heavy use of bear iconography in its flags and symbols, and its late ruler Czar Boris rode a bear into battle.

Theatre

• Older Than Steam, as seen in the works of William Shakespeare. The phrase "Russian bear" appears twice in his works:
  • Henry V: "Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear and have their heads crushed like rotten apples." (Act III, Scene 7)
  • Macbeth: "What man dare, I dare: Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear," (Act III, Scene 4)

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: The villager Vladimir is a bear cub with a stereotypically Russian name whose catchphrase, "nyet", is the Russian word for "no".
• Arknights: The Fantasy Counterpart Culture nation for Russia is Ursus, where bear people are so populous that the Ursus race of bear people is synonymous with the empire itself. It's also Played for Drama as its citizens take such pride that they intentionally discriminate against other animal people trying to make their way up the ladder in the military.
• Aztec Wars: War bears are one of the Russian units.
• Brutal: Paws of Fury: Ivan the Bear has a fighting style described as "Soviet Military."
• Capcom Fighting Evolution: Zangief's ending has him battling several bears in his homeland of Russia after a long dream sequence.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:
  • The soundtrack includes a theme scored for choir and military band called Soviet March. This has undergone Memetic Mutation and has been used — both straight and ironically — as the backing music to videos displaying the might of the Russian armed forces. The lyrics keep returning to the might and hunting prowess of the Soviet bear.
  • The Soviet Union fields war bears as their field scouts.
    • Uprising has Ursa Major, upscaled versions of War Bears that can, and do, destroy buildings and vehicles in seconds.
• LittleBigPlanet 3: The Ziggurat, a Russian-themed kingdom, has various bears roaming the various levels. One challenge level, "Bear With Us", features angry bears jumping around the level.
• Mega Man X5: Grizzly Slash the bear has a base in Russia for his Arms Dealer business.
• Mystik Belle: One of the things you can encounter in the forest is a bear wearing a living ushanka while performing the Cossack squat dance.
• Rubble Trouble Moscow has dancing Russian bears that can be used as wrecking balls similar to the sumo wrestlers from Rubble Trouble: Tokyo.
• Team Fortress 2: The Heavy is sometimes compared to a bear, and one of his melee weapons is a pair of bear claws.
• Total War: Warhammer III: Kislev, a country based on medieval Russia, is heavily associated with bears and bear imagery. In addition to using bears in its faction symbols, its primary deity is the bear god Ursun, whose priests can be recruited as one-man units, it makes heavy use of tamed bears in battle — its heavy cavalry rides bears, as do all character options, and bears also pull war sleds and heavy artillery — and it can recruit and summon powerful elemental monsters resembling bears made out of ice and permafrost. The main plot of the game revolves around the factions delving into the Chaos Realms in order to find the dying Ursun from a Daemon Prince for their own purposes, with Kislev in particular seeking to rescue their God.
• Tropico III: Radio host Juanito will occasionally mention giving the USSR as "the Russian Bear," occasionally proposing that Tropico give it "a big furry hug" if relations are positive.

Web Original

• Volume VIII of Look to the West is called The Bear and the Basilisk, the two superpowers of the era being the Russian Empire and the Societist Combine.

Web Videos

• Princess Tutu Abridged: Played for laughs in Episode 11, which gave a Russian accent to the anthropomorphic bear lady who gives Edel the jewel.^note  Averted by the original anime

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (2020): In the episode "Anima-nyet", there's a non-anthropomorphic bear (based on its looks, a sloth bear) wearing a uniform among Vladimir Putin's (otherwise human) enforcers. It provides the current picture.
• The Cleveland Show: The Brown family has a Russian-accented talking bear named Tim for a neighbor.
• Darkwing Duck: Vladimir Goudenov Grizzlikof, the Russian S.H.U.S.H. Agent, is an anthropomorphic bear.
• Dora the Explorer: As shown in "Dora's World Adventure", Russia has its own version of Swiper, a bear named Fomkah.
• Evil Con Carne: One of the main characters is Boskov, a bear who was initially trained by a Russian animal trainer named Vladimir.
• Family Guy: In "Spies Reminiscent of Us", after arriving in Russia, Stewie and Brian are surprised to find the stereotype is true and Russians really are bears.
  Stewie: Wow, those are the Russian people? I mean, you do think of bears on unicycles when you think of Russian people, but... THEY'RE ALL BEARS ON UNICYCLES!?
  Dan Aykroyd: Bears on unicycles, every one of them.
• Let's Go Luna!: "Lullaby for Baby Vlad" features a Russian bear family. Luna and the gang are enlisted to babysit their fussy cub, Vlad.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012): "Ivan the Terrific" revolves around a lost Russian circus bear who finds his way into the daycare.
• We Bare Bears: In "Yuri and the Bear", it's implied that Ice Bear the polar bear was born in Siberia and it's shown that Yuri the Husky Russkie was a father figure to him.

Real Life

• The brown bear is commonly used as the national animal of Russia, although not as much as it is used by other countries. (During the pre-Revolutionary period, Russia used the Byzantine double-headed eagle.) It almost became part of the coat of arms after the fall of the USSR (but it was decided otherwise).
• The bear is officially used on the coat of arms of the Russian city of Novgorod, as well as that of Zheleznogorsk (with a side order of Soviet Super Science).
• The United Russia party, the dominant political party in Russian politics once led by Vladimir Putin, uses a bear as its symbol. Its current president is Dmitry Medvedev. Speaking of which, and appropriately, the name "Medvedev" means "bear's" in Russian.
• The Tupolev Tu-95, the Soviet Union's main long-range bomber during most of the Cold War, is known by the NATO reporting name "Bear".

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