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Boris & Natashia -- Pride of the KGB

© Dane Mitchell Donato

I would like to now hazard the opinion that one of the more potent symbols of the Cold War is the espionage agent. Because of this, the world of film and literature is ripe with some memorable espionage-based characters and stories, characters and stories that are but a reflection of one of the more glamorous aspects of "us vs. them."

But as memorable as the various works of Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy and John Le Carre (to name but a few authors) can be, perhaps the best fictional spies of all are Boris and Natashia.

Boris and Natashia were, in any case, perhaps the most amusing of the parade of fictional spies. And, at the same time, these two cartoon characters managed to burrow under our collective consciousness to become what "real" Soviet spies should have been like. Jay Ward and Bill Scott gave us, really, the archetypical Russian baddies in the archenemies of Rocky J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose.

"The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" went on the air in November of 1959, and was, from the beginning, a hugely popular hit. The cartoon, besides being funny on many levels -- from the sophisticated to the stupid -- was incredibly well done satire. I imagine that Jonathan Swift and Mr. Voltaire would have been fans of the show.

Not only was it funny and cutting, but it was as subversive as any cartoon that has been on the air in the United States -- at least up until The Simpson burst into our living rooms in the 1990s. And, for our purposes, many of the episodes (and there were a lot of them!) dealt squarely with the Cold War - with Natashia and Boris Badenov usually being at the epicenter of conflict. In an 8-espisode story called "Goof Gas Attack" Boris has developed a secret weapon that ensures an epidemic of concentrated stupidity sweeps the country. In another, they plan to take over the North Pole and replace Kris Kringel.

No matter what Natashia and Boris were up to, being the Russian heavies, you could safely assume them to be found at the center of trouble -- sometimes as the cause of it, but more often than not, taking advantage of the situation at hand.

Now, while Boris and Natashia were the animated Russian heavies, they, like the cartoon they helped to people, worked on many levels. Like all art, B & N were a reflection of what was going on all around us. It's easy to look at the world of the espionage agent through the lens of popular entertainment, but the reality that was being played out in places as exotic and strange as Washington, D.C. and the cold wastes of Siberia, the secret rooms of the Kremlin and the ice flows of the Antarctica continent and straight into the unrest in Europe and Southeast Asia is the stuff of high adventure and baroque diplomacy. The factual cloak and dagger aspects of the Cold War, something Boris Badenov represented with his black outfit and heavy accent, was one of those cases of truth being far stranger than the strangest fiction.

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