"Andrei Tsygankov's Dark Double focuses on the driving power of values and media in structuring US-Russia relations. Values in the political realm translate into culturally and historically established beliefs about the appropriate organization of human institutions and foreign policy. Importantly, politicians do not create value systems; they draw from them. Although many observers argue that US-Russia relations are a simple reflection of elites' political and economic preferences in both countries, these preferences tend to arise from pre-existing belief systems that are deeply rooted in the public and which the mass media constantly accentuates. Dark Double is a succinct account of the major periods in American and Russian mutual perceptions since the Cold War's end. In particular, Tsygankov focuses on the most recent period, in which the two nations have shifted toward viewing the other as a near-existential threat. In Tsygankov's telling, Americans' negative views toward Russia draw from a deep wellspring of suspicion toward the latter country, and they are only enhanced by a biased media that regularly exploits such negativity. Political elites draw from this rather than create the framework themselves.

For instance, according to public polls, Americans and Russians became disappointed in each other's values before the White House and the Kremlin chose to prioritize the issue in their relations during the 2010s. In the United States, the percentage of those viewing Russia unfavorably went up since the mid-2000s, exceeding 50 percent in 2009, whereas anti-American attitudes in Russia increased since 2003, reaching 50 percent in 2005"--.