The wrestler who played a Soviet villain in the ring

Back in the Cold War in the 1980s, Nikolai Volkoff was the most hated bad guy in pro wrestling. The sturdy 300-pounder would stride into the ring wearing a fur ushanka hat and a red turtleneck emblazoned with “U.S.S.R.” in gold letters. Fans would jeer and throw garbage as Volkoff demanded that the crowd stand for his performance of the Soviet anthem. Yet while he found fame playing a foe of America, in reality Volkoff had fled communist Yugoslavia, and used his in-ring persona to mock communism. “I always thought that the more mad I make people, the more they would look into what’s going on over there,” he said. “Then they would learn to hate it as much as I do.” He was born Josip Nikolai Peruzovic in what is now Croatia, to a Russian mother and Croatian father, said

Volkoff started out as a weightlifter, and in 1968, “desperate to escape the oppression of his country’s communist-ruled government,” defected while at a tournament in Vienna. He made his way to Canada and then to the U.S., where he took up entertainmentstyle wrestling and updated his stage name to “Nikolai Volkoff, lover of all things Soviet and wisher of death to America.” Volkoff went on to wrestle “the biggest names in the business, including Bruno Sammartino and Sgt. Slaughter,” said The Washington Post. He dropped the communist gimmick after the fall of the Soviet Union, and finally retired from the ring in 1997, taking a job as a codeenforcement inspector in Baltimore. Volkoff remained fiercely proud to be an American. “I escaped from communism, I come here to this country,” he said in 2016, “and I live American Dream. And I’m happy I’m here.”