Phillip from The Americans Talks Up the USA versus the Soviet Union

From The Americans (FX)

Categories:

Run time: 0:28

Clip Description: A Soviet intelligence officer living undercover in the United States says, briefly and almost unwillingly, that life is better here. Twenty-eight seconds, and the whole Cold War comparison sits inside it.

Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for regime legitimacy and for the problem of preference falsification – the gap between what people say about a system and what they believe. It also opens the comparative question of how citizens evaluate their own regime when they have no basis for comparison, and what changes when they suddenly do.

Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this as a short opener on Cold War comparisons or on legitimacy. Its brevity is the advantage: it makes a claim in one line and leaves the room to argue about whether the comparison is fair, what it is measuring, and who gets to make it.

Discussion Questions

Phillip’s comparison is about consumption — what is in the shops, what an ordinary life looks like day to day. The comparisons governments made during the Cold War were about output: steel, tractors, rockets, launch vehicles. Those two yardsticks gave genuinely different answers in the 1970s and 1980s. Which one should a comparativist use to judge a system, and what does each one leave out?
The admission is reluctant, which is exactly what makes it persuasive on screen. But Phillip is also a man who has lived in the United States for years and is comparing it against a country he left as a young man and has seen only intermittently since. Name two reasons his comparison is unusually well informed, and two reasons it is unusually unreliable.
The Soviet system delivered literacy, life expectancy and industrialisation at remarkable speed, and then stalled. Comparativists distinguish extensive growth — more inputs, more workers, more capital — from intensive growth, which requires innovation and the reallocation of resources away from failing uses. Why is the second so much harder for a planned economy to produce, and does anything in Phillip’s comparison point at that distinction?

Assignment

Pick a single year in the 1980s and build the comparison Phillip is making, using numbers instead of impressions. The Penn World Table gives GDP per capita for both countries on a consistent basis, and the Maddison Project extends the series further back; for the things Phillip is actually talking about, look for consumption per head, housing space per person, and waiting times for durable goods, all of which Soviet statistical yearbooks reported and Western analysts re-estimated. In two pages, say how large the gap was and how confident you are in your figure. The hard part is that Soviet official statistics and CIA estimates disagreed substantially, and the disagreement was itself political — you will have to choose a source and defend the choice.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.

For AP Students

AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 3: Political Culture and Participation

Topics: 3.2 Political Culture; 3.4 Political Values and Beliefs
Skill: Source Analysis
Big idea: Internal and External Forces
Course countries: Russia, China

A Soviet intelligence officer living undercover in the United States admits, briefly and almost against his will, that life is better here. Twenty-eight seconds, and it raises the question the course keeps returning to without ever quite settling: what a comparativist should actually measure when comparing one system against another.

Discussion questions

He is comparing on the basis of daily life — goods, housing, ease. Name two other measures a political scientist might use instead, and say what each one leaves out.
The admission is reluctant, which is exactly what makes it persuasive on screen. Is reluctance good evidence? Explain when it is and when it is not.
A regime can deliver a rising standard of living and remain authoritarian. Name a course country where that is the bargain on offer, and say what the regime asks for in return.

Short activity

Pick the indicator (10 minutes). Each student picks one measure for ranking political systems: GDP per capita, life expectancy, press freedom, or turnout. In three sentences they say what it captures, what it hides, and which course country it flatters most. Then students who chose differently defend their choice against each other. This is a habit of data analysis rather than a point of content, and ten minutes spent on it early in the year pays back every time a chart appears on the board.