If someone asks us to picture a samurai today, we can clearly imagine the archetypal samurai that we have seen depicted so many times, but was knowledge about the samurai a common thing in the Soviet Union before WWII? Where would the average Soviet soldier on the Pacific front have gotten the idea to call his new nemesis for 'samurai'? Did Soviet propaganda paint the Japanese as samurai or was this nickname spread by the more educated among the Soviet soldiers?