He has battled against Nazi villains, a Beduin swordsman and a pit of poisonous snakes. Now Indiana Jones can add the Communist Party of St Petersburg to his list of adversaries.

Party leaders accused the actors Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett yesterday of promoting crude, anti-Soviet propaganda in their new film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. They have urged Russian moviegoers to boycott the film and told Ford, 65, not to visit the country.

The swashbuckling archaeologist’s fourth adventure is set in the Cold War in 1957. It pits Indiana Jones against a sinister KGB agent, played by Blanchett, who leads a ruthless team of Soviet spies in the hunt for a skull endowed with mystical powers.

The Communist Party’s ideology committee in Russia’s secondlargest city saw red over the plot. In an open letter, it declared: “Your work in this film is an insult to the Soviet and Russian people, who remember the difficult Fifties when our country was concluding its reconstruction after the Great War, but did not send merciless terrorists to the USA.” It said that Russians had loved Ford in previous serious roles – which include a Soviet submarine commander in K-19: The Widowmaker – but went on: “You have no future in Russia any more. Speaking plainly, it is better for you not to come here. You will be beaten and despised.”

The party’s central committee called Steven Spielberg’s film an attempt to “slander Soviet Communists” and poison the young against them. It called Ford and Blanchett “capitalist puppets”.

“Our moviegoers are teenagers who are unaware of what happened in 1957,” said Sergei Malinkovich, the chief of the St Petersburg Communist Party chief. “They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war. It’s rubbish.”

Party members were equally scathing in comments posted on its website. Andrei Gindos said: “Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett are second-rate actors serving as the running dogs of the CIA. We need to deprive these people of the right to enter the country.”

The protests appeared to have little impact on the film’s commercial prospects. It was released on Thursday on 808 screens in Russia, a record for a Hollywood film. The Communist Party has withered since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it remains the second largest party in the Duma, the Russian parliament.

Indiana Jones also came under fire in Australia, where the head of the World Archaeological Congress called him an “ethical nightmare” for the profession. Claire Smith, of Newcastle University, said that the fictional archaeologist was guilty of an “imperialist assumption that artefacts in far-flung parts of the world needed ‘protection’ supplied by the West”.

She told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “In pursuit of fortune and glory Jones ignores international treaties, treats human remains as weapons and destroys archaeological sites in a bid to escape from potential entombment. Archaeologists are concerned with preserving the past, not making a profit from it, and sometimes Jones seems more finely tuned to the commercial value of an artefact than the information it can give us.”

Professor Smith conceded, however, that the adventures gave a boost to archaeology by making “a pedantic and exacting science appear exciting”.

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