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“We face an enemy that is ever growing.”
That’s how Jeff Daniels (“The Newsroom”) as Ronald Reagan opens the trailer for “The Brink of War.” The film is based on true events, when President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (played by “Fringe” and “Mad Men” actor Jared Harris) explore a deal that could dismantle their nuclear arsenals or ignite a war.
Also Read: The U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed to join forces if aliens attacked Earth
“With pressure mounting from advisors, intelligence agencies, and history itself, every word spoken brings the world closer to peace… or destruction,” reads the official synopsis.
It’s probably going to be a great film, especially for Cold War and history buffs. It’s written and directed by Michael Russell Gunn, who spent several years conducting research for the project, including interviewing former Secretary of State George Shultz (portrayed in the film by “Whiplash” star J.K. Simmons) and consulting now-declassified official transcripts from the 1986 summit in Iceland.
But it’s wild to revisit America’s history with Russia as if all the animosity is in the past, considering Putin’s behavior on the global stage. I started to think about this when I realized that 2026 brings us not one but two films about Russia’s contemporary leadership:
“The Brink of War” centers on Reagan’s 1986 Reykjavík Summit with Mikhail Gorbachev while “The Wizard of the Kremlin” begins four years later, in 1990, as the Soviet Union falls and Vladimir Putin rises to power in the new Russian Federation.
Now, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is adapted from the French political satire novel of the same name, and it follows a fictional government official inspired by Russian politician Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s man in the shadows, if you will, a puppeteer helping lift Putin into power.
Some Very Brief* Contemporary Russian History
*There is so much to cover—don’t come at me if I miss your favorite parts.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the Russian Empire was ruled by Tsar Nicholas II, and was the last absolute monarchy in Europe. The Russian famine of 1891-1892 killed hundreds of thousands of people, leading to political radicalization and the growing popularity of ideas—like communism.
In 1905, a revolution forced the Tsar to create of a national parliament. Less than a decade later, Russia joined the Entente powers in the First World War, which bred further discontent from its people, due to food and fuel shortages, massive casualties, and rising inflation. The February Revolution of 1917 led to Nicholas’ abdication, the formation of a Russian Provisional Government, and the proclamation of the first Russian Republic.
That government was overthrown by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the 1917 October Revolution. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with an ideology based on Leninist and later Marxist-Leninist principles centered on overthrowing the pre-existing capitalist state system in favor of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” wherein the working class would (in theory) hold power.
The Soviet Union established by the Bolsheviks encompassed almost (but not all) of the former Russian Empire, which, by the way, becomes a complete clusterf*ck. What we know today as Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Moldova, and Romania, broke away and became independent states… for a while, anyway.
When Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power and ushered in a government that took control of all economic activity, including agriculture and manufacturing. Those policies led to a famine that killed millions between 1932 and 1933, as well as the Holodomor in Ukraine, a manmade famine that killed millions more in Ukraine alone.
Stalin then executed hundreds of thousands of real and perceived political opponents in what was known as “The Great Purge.” He oversaw the Gulags, a system of forced labor camps that all but enslaved 18 million people. And in 1939, the Red Army invaded Eastern Poland as part of a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, which invaded Poland from the West.
In 1941, Germany infamously broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union, pushing Stalin and the USSR into the Allied camp and World War II. The Allies, of course, won the war.
Peace on Earth, right? Not so much.
Enter the Cold War. The Soviets became one of the founding states of the United Nations, but Stalin and President Harry S. Truman disagreed over how to rebuild Eastern Europe. The Americans held the trump card (nuclear weapons) as the Soviets raced to build their own. In 1949, the U.S. and Western Europe formed a mutual defense pact, NATO, to counter Soviet aggression.
Later that year, the Soviets finally tested their own atomic bomb as communism spread to other governments. The Cold War was in full swing. Over the coming decades, East met West in proxy conflicts all over the world.
As the Arsenal of Democracy, the United States didn’t technically fight the Soviet Union directly, but they weren’t friends either. Soviet and American troops unofficially provided each other’s enemies with arms, supplies, and training. The 1960s brought an unprecedented nuclear arms race as the two Cold War superpowers competed for global supremacy.
Along the way, they built enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet.
Mutually Assured Destruction*
*Hey! You’re still with me! We’re catching up to the movies this article is about!
Between 1969 and 1979, the Cold War superpowers experienced a period of easing tensions called “détente.” Instead of exchanging threats, the U.S. and USSR tried diplomacy instead. But in 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, ending détente and escalating the so-called “Cold” War. Then, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, a move many feared would lead to World War III.
Reagan was not only opposed to arms control, he wanted a massive military buildup—and was not quiet about how much he hated communists. So it came as a shock to pretty much everyone when he not only got along with Gorbachev, he was willing to give up America’s entire nuclear arsenal at the Reykjavík Summit if Gorby would do the same. “The Brink of War” takes us behind the scenes of that summit.
The war in Afghanistan bled the Soviets (literally and figuratively). It could no longer afford both a nuclear arms race and an endless land war in Asia. In the 1980s, the entire communist bloc began to unravel. Mikhail Gorbachev would become the last leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 and rule until the country was dissolved in 1991.
Gorbachev tried to unf*ck the Soviet system, but it turned out to really bean all-or-nothing thing. You either have absolute control over people so they’re just frantically trying to stay alive, or you give them some freedom and then they infuriatingly want to be free.
The Soviet Union officially ended on Dec. 25, 1991, and the Russian Federation took power the next day. And Russia’s backslide into Soviet-level corruption and oppression is where “The Wizard of the Kremlin” picks up the story.
Vladimir Putin has been the de facto leader of Russia since 1999, heralding in record levels of fraud and corruption, human rights violations, media censorship, restriction of free and fair elections, war crimes, military conflicts, and, well, if you’ve served in the military at some point in the past 25 years then you know.
Right? You do know, right? This guy is not our friend.
So why are we casting Jude “Sexiest-Man-on-Earth” Law to play him?
The answer is probably as simple as “to sell tickets” but also, political satire is an incredibly effective form of entertainment and education. We’ve all heard about Putin in the news, but what do people really know about him? How many people who were not reading newspapers in 1986 know about Mikhail Gorbachev?
And why do they matter?
The important answer is because Russia (and its Soviet legacy) still impacts the United States and its allies to this day. Mutually Assured Destruction meant we wouldn’t shoot nukes at each other for fear of being annihilated ourselves, but today’s wars are being fought online. I say this as a prior intelligence officer with a mission set that I promise you means I know what I’m talking about.
If we, as citizens with the hard-won freedom to vote for our government officials, do not pay attention, we risk losing that freedom (and many other freedoms). It’s hubris to think something that happened to Russians couldn’t happen here. In many ways, it already is.
The Gulag didn’t nab 18 million people in one night: it happened systemically over time before the populace figured out how to do anything about it. Sound familiar? So that’s why political and historical films matter.
Get thee to the theater!
“The Wizard of the Kremlin” is available to stream now and “The Brink of War” hits theaters on August 14.
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