Roughly seven in 10 Americans view Russia as a threat to the United States, a new poll released Friday shows, the highest percentage since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Sixty-nine percent say Russia presents a "very" or "moderately" serious threat to America -- up 25 percentage points since April 2012, according to the CNN/ORC International poll.

“The Americans,” a Cold War drama portraying a married couple working in their travel agency, but in reality are KGB spies working for Russia’s Committee of State Security, is returning for a second season on FX Network, at a time when tensions between the U.S. and Russia are on the rise. The first season of the series set in the 80s, launched earlier in 2013, saw an average of 1.85 million viewers, according The Holly Reporter.

Russia is back, or at least that is what you were supposed to think while watching the 2014 Sochi Olympics over the past two weeks. To prove it, Russia spent 51 billion dollars on the first-ever Winter Olympics staged in a subtropical climate zone and took great pains to showcase Russian culture, diversity, wealth, talent, and swagger during nonstop coverage of the Olympic mega-event.

Twenty-five years ago, Ted Turner and Bob Wussler answered an emergency call from the Soviet Union. On the other end were Kim Bohuny and Mike Fratello, pleading from inside a lightless cement bunker, deep behind Soviet lines. They had a simple request. Food. And water.

In a 1958 article in The Atlantic, the Sinologist George E. Taylor considered this Moscow-Beijing alliance in an article entitled "Why We Do Not Recognize Red China." Aside from the era-appropriate use of the term "red"—scholars then distinguished between the Communist-led Chinese government on the mainland and the Nationalist-led one in Taiwan—Taylor's essay argues that the United States shouldn't recognize the Communist government ruling Beijing.

This connection between communication and organization pops up in Cold War thinking on writings on ‘public diplomacy’ notably in W. Philips Davison’s (1965) International Political Communication. Davison argues that the key role of communication should be to support the organization of pro-US political forces rather than attacking the communists.

Still the longest State Department sponsored tour in U.S. history, the groundbreaking odyssey was conducted at the height of the Cold War and was only the second cultural mission of its kind to take place during that tense political period.