The intersectional analysis investigates US-American discourses around Russia, its citizens and the construction of (national) cultural values, cultural representations, and identities. In recent years, public news in the United States frequently focused on the vulnerability of Russian women, LGBTs, and people with disabilities vis-à-vis the Russian state, the Orthodox Church, and mainstream society. Popular culture discovered Russian feminists, queers, and people with disabilities as worthy of its attention, and TV series and Hollywood films started featuring Russian protagonists. The project asks for the reasons, cultural significance and goals of the increasing interest in Russian subjects and bodies. It interrogates into the place of Russian vulnerable citizens against the background of the increasing disassociation of Russia from the US within media reports, tabloids, TV-shows, and popular culture, as well as countercultural discourses. The key hypothesis is that within US discourses Russia serves as paragon for intolerance and authoritarianism that allows for a construction of the USA as the most tolerant and progressive country in the world. The points or figures of reference for this binary co-construction are the regime's victims—sexual and gender minorities, women and people with disabilities. With the US, the whole global West becomes signified as a positive role model, against the anti-modern, backward and orthodox Russian Federation. Moreover, the ideas of what makes modernity or postmodernity modern, as well as its core concepts of freedom, tolerance and progress become reframed along and against the image of Russia.