I've taken plenty of American history courses, and you can't discuss the Cold War without mentioning McCarthyism and the Red Scare. My question is, did anything like that occur in the Soviet Union? Were the USSR and its citizens paranoid that American spies had infiltrated their government? Were there any public trails? Any moral outrage at "capitalism"?
All of these things seem like a very American response to the Cold War, but since I have little to no Russian history experience, I thought I'd ask. Thanks!
You might be interested in some threads from the FAQ section on "What Did Soviets Think..":
Soviet Government and Subversive Activities
Soviet Media in General
Soviet history, especially during the Great Purge, is full of scares about saboteurs resulting in show trials. However AFAIK none of that was really about Americans per se. And most of it predates the Cold War proper. The Soviet bogeymen were more typically kulaks (successful farmers who resisted collectivization/peasants who seemed "too prosperous"), and people accused of "wrecking". However, the purges were of people who were seen as being right-wing or pro-capitalist, so I guess at a stretch you could see it as the equivalent of McCarthyism?
(Keep in mind that the Red Scare and especially McCarthyism had very little to do with the reality of anything going on in the USSR at the time, and a lot more to do with American anxieties about left-wing politics in general. For instance Los Angeles got rid of public housing partially out of fears that it was "communist". Which is blatantly silly, almost on the level of politicians in the USSR accusing anyone they didn't like of "wrecking".)
On the other hand, during the Soviet period there was social antipathy towards "speculators", which I suppose could be seen as anti-capitalist and thus anti-American sentiment. But I think in any society where there is rationing and shortages, there will also be resentment of profiteers. It doesn't have to be connected to anti-American propaganda.
The fear of subversives in the USSR was a "white" scale, not a "blue" one. During the Russian Civil War, the Communists were the "reds" and their opposition were all "whites," so they associated the color with "reactionary doctrines."
You should look up the Great Purge, and Stalin's terror in general. All through the Stalin period there were show-trials, massive imprisonments, complete paranoia on a level that makes McCarthyism look quaint by comparison. There were peaks in the 1930s but in general it was something that went through Stalin's whole career. It continued into the post-Stalin period to a lesser, but still significant, extent. In Stalinist ideology there were threats from outside and threats from inside, threats all over — class threats (kulaks, engineers), ethnic threats (any minority group in the USSR who didn't look like they'd easily assimilate), state threats (German, American, British spies), saboteurs, "wreckers," you name it. It had more of an arbitrary nature to it than the US case — in the US, people generally didn't just get randomly targeted, they had to have at least associated with someone deemed dubious, signed their name to the wrong cause, given money to the wrong organization, etc. In the Soviet case, you could get denounced by your neighbor simply because they had to denounce someone to get out of the "torture" phase of imprisonment and into the "labor camp" phase of it.
The above is an obvious oversimplification — the Soviet terror campaigns are too much to summarize in one comment.
The peak was before the war, not after. Many trials of the Great Purge included accusations of working for the intelligence services of one of the capitalist countries.
This exact question was asked and answered thoroughly a while ago here. It should be in the FAQs really since I've seen it a few times.