Excerpts from the July 15, 2011 Moscow Times article by by Andrew Squire "Hot Dogs, Baseball Meet Borscht, Hockey." (Read the full article here).

On the first day of his American history class at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Ivan Ivanov and his classmates had a pop quiz: What comes to mind when you think of America? For Ivanov, a 19-year-old Kazan native with an American stepfather, it was Elvis, Washington, democracy. For his friend, it was baseball and hot dogs.

[Yevgeny Savostyanov, senior vice president of Sistema Mass-Media and deputy chairman of the Society for Russian-American Rapprochement], pointed to history and culture to explain the sustained animosity between the United States and Russia. "There is a profound difference in the histories, cultures and mentalities of our two peoples. At the heart of the American tradition are individualism, initiative and personal responsibility. The basis of ours is paternalism and conformity. This is the reason for the irregular and sometimes aggressive treatment of internal events, when you look at them from the other side," he said.

Troy McGrath, director of the Russian-American Center for American Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, or RSUH, characterized Russians' feelings as aspiring to "rivalry" rather than expressing animosity, and chalked it up to a relic of the Cold War. "Russians are still adjusting" to a different world order, he said. Most of the truly anti-American sentiment is generated by the Russian media, McGrath added.

Lozansky, a Soviet dissident who moved to the United States in 1976 before returning over a decade later, offered another explanation: ignorance. He noted that Russians and Americans "don't know what's really going on" in each other's countries. A professor and several students of American studies at Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) supported that theory. "I have friends who think America is still full of cowboys and Marines," Ivanov said.