Despite Joseph Stalin loving John Wayne on screen (but reportedly sending the KGB to kill him off screen), cowboy films were not seen to be ideologically suitable for the nation. When they were first produced Russian newspapers reported on how dynamic and forthright these horsemen were, but they wore very peculiar hats, spoke weirdly and did not ride their horses in the same way men in the Caucasus did. In a similar vein to the Italian ‘spaghetti westerns’, ‘borscht westerns’ were filmed far
from the Wild West, in the steppes of the Soviet republics and substituted native Indians for Turkic tribesmen.
