"How," Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?" You could chalk that up to the paradox of being French, but it turns out that even a Godless Russian Communist wasn't sure how to respond to the Duke's charms. According to documentarian Lucy Ash, writing in The New Statesman, "Stalin was both fascinated and infuriated by John Wayne; the American actor's anti-communism so disturbed Uncle Joe that, according to Orson Welles, he once sent the KGB to California to assassinate him." Some of the Soviet leaders who came to power during the post-Stalin thaw were puppies by comparison, reduced to puddles of fanboy mush by far lesser lights. Leonid Brezhnev, it seems, had a jowly man-crush on Chuck Connors. "At a party hosted by President Nixon, Connors presented a delighted Brezhnev with a pair of Colt .45 revolvers. The general secretary returned the favour by allowing the American series [The Rifleman] to be shown on Soviet TV."
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