Time Travel and the Rejection of Politics

Revisiting history is inherently political. No choice made about representation, characterization, and plot contributes to a vision of the past that can be considered neutral. But the politics at stake are almost always about the author’s present day rather than about the time to which the heroes travel, as the World War II Time Crasher films clearly show. But just as every utopia contains an implicit anthropology (“humans are X who need Y to be happy”), every Time Crasher story embodies theories of history, politics, and human agency.

There are reasons why so many Time Crashers end up on the battlefield, reasons beyond both questions of entertainment and the crucial role wars have played in modern Russian history. For all their complexity, wars are particularly conducive to a simplistic model of cause and effect; for the Time Crasher, they are, at best, Gordian knots waiting for a sword to slice them in two. The fantasy of traveling back to a historical war rests on the identification of specific turning points when a single intervention can change the course of history.¹ But how does this work in peacetime?

It seems to work for the Soviet Union—or, rather, the authors of Time Crasher stories have little trouble making it work. The Soviet government portrayed in these stories is top-heavy, hierarchical, and, most importantly, devoid of modern politics. What passes for politics is more like palace intrigue: who is plotting against whom, who can come out ahead. The extent to which this is an oversimplification of actual Soviet governmental structures is a question I’m happy to leave to historians, but at the very least it is worth noting how easily the Soviet Union gets represented in such a fashion. All it takes to right the wrongs of history is to assassinate the appropriate target.

When I try to imagine going back to the second half of the twentieth century to steer the United States on a path that parallels my own political leanings, it is hard to come up with a reasonable agenda. Prevent Ronald Reagan from being elected, perhaps, but how would I do that? Get the Federal Communications Commission not to cease enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 in order to prevent the rise of Fox News? Even Arsenyev’s favorite device, political assassination, would have problems beyond the crucial question of morality. What would the electoral and political consequences have been if John Hinckley had succeeded in his 1981 attempt on Reagan’s life? Liberal procedural democracy, for all its many flaws, does not provide many obvious levers for a Time Crasher to pull.

Successful Time Crasher interventions have a built-in bias against political complexity, one that suspiciously reflects the ideological leanings of the genre’s most prominent practitioners. The authors of Time Crasher stories tend to prefer an illiberal, hierarchical, centralized form of government, one that is easy to project onto the Soviet past. Procedural politics is replaced by conspiratorial scheming, whether by the evil (often liberal) cabals that must be defeated, or the guardians of righteousness who know better than to let legal formalities or ethical scruples prevent them from doing what is best for the country.

This disdain for complexity points back to the central premise of the genre itself. Time Crasher stories have no patience for internally consistent, plausible explanations for time travel, just as they have no interest in procedural politics. The broader time travel genre, by contrast, uses detail and nuance as part of the appeal (“Just how does time travel work here?” “What are the possible unintended consequences?”). The complexity of the time travel posited by a story is in direct proportion to the complexity of its view of politics.

That politics is usually one of a romantic, organic conception of the nation or state. The stories that have Time Crashers personally intervene in pivotal moments of history encourage identification between the individual and the nation, recapitulating a model of heroism that is familiar from Soviet socialist realism. The story needs a hero, a man whose personal qualities help him save the day, but along the way the hero either learns or confirms his own lesser individual importance in comparison with the greater good. Any rugged individualism he might have is properly subsumed into the ideology of patriotism that justifies the individual’s existence.

But when the Time Crasher’s destination is not of grand historical import, and when his presence in the past (or, very occasionally, the future) is either not connected to any particular salvational mission or, as in the case of the Save the USSR! series, so drawn out over a series of novels as to retain only the slenderest thread of a mission statement at a given moment, the relationship between the individual and the nation is less clear-cut, and possibly open to renegotiation. Instead, the hero’s story comments on both the nation’s past and the present day’s preoccupation with that past metaphorically. The hero’s personal travails, and particularly his relations with loved ones, highlight the regressive nature of both contemporary nostalgia for the Soviet past and the Time Crasher genre itself—particularly when the Time Crasher is mentally traveling backward along his own personal timeline.

How I Met My Mother: The Dark Side of the Moon

Physically traveling back in time is a much less direct rebuke to the very idea of either progress or entropy, because awakening in a younger body is an obvious regressive fantasy. Lukyanenko’s Solnyshkin/Petrov is a dying old man rewarded with a literal second childhood, while the protagonist of Save the USSR! gets to relive his teenage years with the confidence, maturity, and foreknowledge of his adult self. This adds an uncomfortable element to the fantasy, since now we find ourselves witnessing the seduction of teenage girls by a middle-aged man effectively disguised as an adolescent.

The sexual transgressions, whether teased or realized, are revealing. Consider Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classic reinterpretation of the Oedipus story in “The Structural Study of Myth.” In nearly every aspect of the story, from the parricide and the incest on the one hand to the riddle of the Sphynx on the other, Lévi-Strauss sees the centrality of kinship, whether overemphasized (incest) or underemphasized (parricide), resulting in a mythic investigation of the drama of origins: the strange mystery of biological reproduction (the child is the product of the mother and father) and the confrontation with the opposing myth of autochthony (creatures like the Sphynx arise from the earth without parent or precursor). The attempt to answer the question “where did my country go wrong?” (and subsequently remedy the error through personal extrahistorical intervention) is bound up with the problem of individual human origin and development (how did I get this way, and how can I be better?).

An Oedipal undercurrent flows throughout the first season of the hit series The Dark Side of the Moon (2012). It is so Oedipal, in fact, that it satisfies the criteria for Freud, Levi-Strauss, and even Sophocles. Dark Side of the Moon is one of the many international remakes of the British series Life on Mars (2006–2007), about a Manchester police officer who gets into a car accident in 2006 and wakes up in 1973 (North American, Spanish, Czech, and South Korean versions aired in 2008, 2009, 2017, and 2018, respectively, and a Chinese series is said to be in the works).² Part of the fun in Life on Mars is vicariously experiencing the hero’s culture shock as he is confronted by the crude and racist police tactics of the 1970s. Imagine how much greater the contrast is for the Russian (and, presumably, the Czech) remake. The years represent a catastrophic rupture, with the hero traveling not only in time but from a relatively new country to the collapsed empire from which it emerged.

The drama inherent in the Soviet collapse could have been enough of a hook, but the producers of the Russian remake added a significant personal complication. Where Sam Tyler, the hero of Life on Mars, goes back to 1973 as himself, Moscow Police Captain Mikhail Mikhailovich Solovyov wakes up in the body of his father, Moscow Militia Captain Mikhail Ivanovich Solovyov. This is particularly poignant, since the show begins with Solovyov and his mother sitting in a hospital corridor after Mikhail Ivanovich, the estranged husband and father, has just died. Mikhail Ivanovich has always been a mystery to his son, one he will never have a chance to solve. Or will he?

This mystery, it turns out, is as Oedipal as can be. Oedipus, we recall, had to solve the riddle of the Sphynx (“What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening?”), the answer to which is “man.” As a man, Oedipus is a subset of the riddle’s solution, but also a particularly exemplary one, since, as Lévi-Strauss points out, his biography acts out wordplay based on his name. “Oedipus” means “swollen foot,” an apt description based on the result of his foot being tied to a stake when he was exposed on a hilltop as an infant. As a result, he walks an errant path, which is true in every sense: he runs into his unknown father (and kills him) and marries his own mother. The answer to the Riddle of the Sphynx is not just “man,” but the human life cycle itself, and Oedipus is the human life cycle as twisted tragedy.³

Solovyov, now in his father’s body, has an uncanny relationship with mirrors: when he looks in them, he sees himself in his own adult body. Somehow, the mirror displays the “real” Solovyov trapped inside his father’s body, even though logic would tell us that he should see his father’s face. Solovyov cannot see himself in the mirror as his father; like Oedipus, he does not recognize his sire. His mother thinks of him as her husband, and Solovyov’s horrified rejections of his mother/wife’s affections only increase his parents’ estrangement. Even worse, Mikhail Mikhailovich Solovyov is already alive in 1979, as a small boy who finds his father’s behavior baffling. In the first episode, Solovyov frantically tries to stuff his childhood self’s head with useful knowledge about the future, only to confuse him completely (“Buy dollars before the ruble collapses!”). He tells his son not to get involved with Svetka, who will give him the “hussar’s drip” (gusarskii nasmork), slang for gonorrhea. When little Misha asks his mother about Dad’s case of “hussar’s drip,” she draws the logical conclusion, and soon Solovyov is kicked out of the house.

Solovyov’s interference in his own timeline is tantamount to the destruction of his parents’ marriage, a combination of both Oedipal wish fulfillment as nightmare (taking the father’s place) and the child of divorced parents’ guilty fantasy (that the child is responsible for the parents’ separation). Every encounter Solovyov has in 1979 with an adult woman, no matter how innocent, puts another nail in the coffin of his parents’ marriage. When Lyuda, his mother/wife, sees him talking with the nurse who helped him at the hospital, she tells him that their son (little Misha) will never be like him (Misha’s father, or adult Misha in Misha’s father’s body). In fact, she says, “I’ll make sure of that” (Ia postaraius’). Yet Misha does grow up to be like his father, following in his figurative footsteps as cop before literally filling his shoes by taking over Mikhail Ivanovich’s body in the past.

Solovyov’s possession of his father’s body makes all his interactions with Lyuda impossible. The Oedipal taboo has taken firm hold of his adult consciousness precisely at the point when his physicality and living situation would make breaking the taboo conventional and expected. Meanwhile, his meetings with Lena, young Misha’s teacher, are complicated by the same dynamic but with the valences reversed: as he himself informs her, little Misha has (had) a crush on her, and we can see that those feelings live on in the adult Solovyov. Lena, of course, could harbor no such romantic sentiments for a prepubescent boy but finds Solovyov’s father irresistible.

The tragedy of Oedipus Rex is famously structured on the interplay between knowledge and ignorance, brought to the forefront at moments of revelation: when Oedipus realizes the man he killed was his father, and the woman he married was his mother, he puts out his eyes. When Jocasta realizes she has been sleeping with her son, she hangs herself. In the failure to recognize what in other contexts would be familiar, not to mention “homey” (heimlich), Oedipusis a tragedy stemming from the heroes’ inability to recognize the uncanny scenario they inhabit. Mother is Mother, but also something else at the same time. Solovyov does not have the luxury of blindness, whether literal or figurative: he knows that he has returned to the scene of his childhood but in a world that, for him, is now askew. His is what Time Crasher stories posit as the essential post-Soviet condition: living somewhere between two equally familiar and equally strange worlds.

Let us dispense with the niceties that Oedipal language affords us—the Solovyov family is fucked up when we meet them, and The Dark Side of the Moon’s first season, in the guise of a time-traveling police procedural about catching a crazed killer, is the story of how Solovyov himself fucks up his family (the metaphor works in both English and Russian, if somewhat differently). The Dark Side of the Moon is a remake, but the incestuous, dysfunctional family drama is entirely the invention of the Russian series’ creators. What does it add, and what does it have to do with the historical drama that the time-traveling metaphor affords?

Surely, it is about more than mere paradox. Time travel paradoxes are a dime a dozen, as are cautionary tales about leaving history alone. In any case, the radical indeterminacy of time travel as a plot device in The Dark Side of the Moon does not make the series a compelling vehicle for such messages. As in Life on Mars, the show never lets the viewer be sure just how real the past in which the hero has found himself actually is; repeated attempts by doctors to contact a comatose Solovyov in 2011 could mean that the entire series is nothing but a hallucination. And if it is not a hallucination, what is the point in highlighting the dangers of temporal interference if the hero has no control of his comings and goings?

That Seventies Show

The stakes of the Solovyov family drama lie outside the science fiction genre, because the problem is fantasy itself. Here I am deliberately conflating “fantasy” in the Freudian sense (a desire that is entertained and perhaps simultaneously suppressed) and in terms of genre (stories with a fantastic premise). Solovyov the adult is forced to act out the fantasies of Solovyov the child and, as a result, puts the grown-up Solovyov in a strangely childlike position (it doesn’t help that the actor is constantly contorting his face into bug-eyed confusion). By going back in time, Solovyov is enacting inherently regressive fantasies (about his mother, his father, his teacher). Technically an adult, he becomes a child’s projection of an adult’s behavior (“When I grow up, I’m going to be a militia captain and date my teacher”). In the Odyssey, Telemachus remarks that “it is a wise child that knows his own father.” Little Misha never understood Mikhail Ivanovich, and now that the child has become the father (to the man?), he gains practical knowledge of the events of his family’s rupture but remains in the dark about his father’s inner life. Even when trapped within Mikhail Ivanovich’s head, Solovyov is just as far from understanding his father as he always had been. His father’s actual thoughts and feelings will always be a mystery. This is what makes his encounters with mirrors so poignant. When he looks in the mirror, it is his own reflection that looks back at him: he literally cannot see his father.

This is all well and good, but to care about Solovyov’s time-displaced Oedipal angst might require that we care about Solovyov, or at lease to argue for the psychological complexity of the show’s characters or the depth and nuance of its writing and direction. On those terms, The Dark Side of the Moon provides too weak a foundation to support a theory-heavy exegesis. It stands out as one of the better serials produced in the beginning of the 2010s, but as police dramas go, it’s not exactly Russia’s answer to The Wire.

What, then, do Solovyov and his family tell us about the show’s central conceit—that is, about the immersion of a present, post-Soviet consciousness into the Soviet past? If the time travel is viewed as a metaphor (where it certainly functions better than as an actual science fictional trope), any possible cautionary tale would be about a particular kind of preoccupation with the past, an interrogation of the nostalgic impulses that dominated so much of Russian mass culture in the first Putinist decade.

On that level, The Dark Side of the Moon is deceptively seductive. Many episodes include a moment when Solovyov happens to run into a future luminary under humorous circumstances. Whether it’s meeting the future shlock pop star Filipp Kirkorov, as a little boy expressing contempt for the pop diva Alla Pugacheva (whom he will grow up to marry), or interrupting the filming of a Soviet adaptation of Astrid Lindgren’s Karlson on the Roof series (a beloved children’s franchise so ubiquitous in the Soviet Union and its successor states that it may as well be Russian), The Dark Side of the Moon provides a steady supply of just the sort of nostalgia-tinged easter eggs to satisfy the tourist/viewer’s demand for recognizably dated realia.

But one of the best easter eggs appearing in the second episode mixes humor and politics in a fashion that should give the viewer pause. Solovyov stands by as a young woman breaks up with her boyfriend, who protests that one day, he will accomplish great things. In fact, it immediately becomes clear to both Solovyov and the viewers that this young man will grow up to be the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky spent a decade in prison on what are widely considered politically motivated bribery charges. Upon his release in 2013, he devoted himself to funding opposition and civil society initiatives in the Russian Federation.

When the episode aired, Khodorkovsky was still incarcerated, and at the time when the story takes place, he would have been sixteen, with no legitimate reason to imagine himself as either a rich man or a political prisoner. Only Solovyov (and the viewer) can see the future oligarch and convict in the form of the gangly boy. Trying to reassure a heartbroken Khodorkovsky, Solovyov tells him, “Everything is going to work out fine for you. [Beat.] Well, almost everything.”

It’s clever and funny, but it is also ethically complicated. As a joke in 2011, Solovyov’s remark is a perfect example of the way something that could be a hot-button political issue gets addressed on state television. The moment relies on our knowledge of Khodorkovsky’s career without in any way commenting on either the validity of the prosecution against him or the legality with which he (and all the other oligarchs) amassed their fortunes. Between 1979 and 2011, things just happen to Khodorkovsky; his wealth and incarceration, like Kirkorov’s marriage to Pugacheva, are simply recognizable milestones on the road from the Brezhnev era to the Medvedev years.

There is nothing that Solovyov could reasonably have been expected to do in order to change Khodorkovsky’s fate (assuming that this would be a desirable goal), so this scene is simply one of many in which Solovyov as the viewer’s stand-in is not faced with any real-time ethical dilemma. The fact that the show refrains from taking any kind of stand on Khodorkovsky at all is, in itself, a decision with ethical ramifications: is this a matter on which one can really simply be “neutral”? The reasonable fear of political repercussions for taking such a stand in 2011 in many ways gets the creators of the show off the hook. Who would really expect to turn on Channel One and watch a fantastical police procedural defend the country’s most famous political prisoner?

But there is another aspect of this scene that must be kept in mind: Solovyov’s role here is simply that of random observer. He is not operating in his professional capacity as an officer of the Moscow militia. Elsewhere, however, his encounters with potentially loaded historical moments unfold as part of his job. This raises a question that the show studiously avoids: what does it mean to enforce the law under a completely different political system? And are these the laws that should be enforced?

Who Watches the Watchmen?

First broadcast in 2012, The Dark Side of the Moon nevertheless chooses 2011 as its setting. This might simply be an artifact of the production process, but the year 2011 could not be more significant for a Russian police drama. On March 1 of that year, the federal government implemented a sweeping reform of the Russian policing systems, aimed at, among other things, addressing corruption, clarifying the rights of detainees, and improving the force’s image. Not only was the system completely federalized but its very name was changed, from militia (militsiia) to police (politsiia) (Semukhina 1–2). Solovyov is specifically a police officer, so the action has to take place after March 1. The change in nomenclature helps intensify the alienation effect of the hero’s travel to 1979, since he has to get used to being a militiaman again (even if he could not have been “police” for more than a few months before the show started). Even without the 2011 reform, the contrasts with the 1979 militia would have been stark. Adding in the reform might make the show feel more contemporary to 2012 viewers, who have just gotten used to the new name. More important, however, is that starting out in postreform Moscow further historicizes the police.⁴ As much as the proponents of strict law and order might prefer to act as though police organizations are apolitical entities that simply enforce the laws of the land, the dual settings of The Dark Side of the Moon remind us (and, perhaps, Solovyov) just how historically and politically contingent police activity actually is.

When one of Solovyov’s cases involves black marketeers illegally trading in Western rock records, Solovyov’s knowledge of Pink Floyd allows him to pose as a buyer, just as his fluency in English (a rarity in the USSR in 1979) helps him communicate with an American journalist accused of spying. In the first case, both Solovyov and the contemporary viewer cannot be expected to see these activities as truly criminal, but Solovyov seems to have no compunction about simply doing his job (to be fair, he’s also trying to solve a murder). In the second, the journalist does turn out to be involved in espionage, so simple patriotism is enough of a justification, but the question still remains that in stopping the spy, what exactly is Solovyov defending? Particularly in 1979, the year that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan?⁵ Or, on a far more prosaic note, in Episode 6, as part of a murder investigation, he confronts a saleswoman in an electronics store about her illegal purchase of … Polish lipstick. She bursts into tears and begs him not to send her to prison. He doesn’t, but the question remains: if Solovyov could put a woman in prison for buying imported black-market cosmetics from a Polish visitor, is there any justice in his work?

Solovyov’s double consciousness as a Time Crasher creates as many problems as it solves. Early on, we see that the 1979 Solovyov accidentally causes the scar that will set the adult Red, his antagonist in both time periods, on the path that leads to their time loop. Solovyov, with his foreknowledge and confusion, inadvertently ruins his parents’ marriage. But the pleasures of the show are based precisely on the viewers’ privileged twenty-first-century position as they gaze upon (or, in Solovyov’s case, act upon) a nostalgia-tinged late Soviet Moscow. If Solovyov turns out to be culpable for much of what happens in his own twisted timeline, what does that say about the viewers?

When Solovyov returns to 1979, he is back in the seemingly innocent world of his childhood, both discovering and ensuring that it is actually not all that innocent. The Seventies are a popular destination for Time Crashers, but for a very different type of story from the adventures that heroes encounter when traveling back to World War II (the most popular destination of all). Heroism in the 1970s is hard to find, and that may well be the attraction. This is the height of what the perestroika era called the “Period of Stagnation,” now viewed through rose-tinted glasses as a time of enviable stability. And, indeed, The Dark Side of the Moon, by placing Solovyov right before the invasion of Afghanistan, lets the viewers visit the Soviet Union during the peak of Stagnation. Meanwhile, the contemporary viewer turns out to be living in the last days of true Putinist stability (while the series was produced, Putin and Medvedev announced their plan for Putin’s return to the presidency; the economy was plummeting, and Russia was about to experience a wave of protests unlike anything it had seen in years).

The plot of The Dark Side of the Moon brings together two eras that were already linked discursively, and, thanks to Solovyov’s interference, draws them into something approaching quantum entanglement. Just as Solovyov is obliged to rethink his parents’ marriage and his place in their family, the viewers are confronted with the inconsistencies in their own nostalgia: they may appreciate the 1970s’ law and order, but what about the time spent chasing down purveyors of Pink Floyd, a group now so beloved and mainstream that its most famous album is used as the series’ title?⁶

The Soviet nostalgia encouraged by the early Putin years was a libidinal investment on the population’s part, focused on most of the citizens’ childhood or youth. The end of the first season of The Dark Side of the Moon shows what happens when historical passions turn incestuous. It is not just Solovyov’s family that has been irrevocably broken but, thanks to his own actions in 1979, when Solovyov wakes up again in 2011, he is in a completely new world, one in which the Soviet Union still exists. For many, this would be the perfect nostalgic wish fulfillment, but the second season might make them reconsider. Life might not be better on the dark side of the moon.

A Hero of Someone Else’s Time

Perhaps due to its roots in the original Life on Mars, The Dark Side of the Moon stands out not just for the close attention to family dynamics but for the relatively low stakes of the entire first season. By “low stakes” I do not mean that the events of the series are inconsequential. Far from it. After all, Solovyov’s interference in his own timeline creates the alternate reality that is the setting of Season 2. But this is an accident unrelated to the overall plot of Season 1. In fact, it is a rather arbitrary consequence of the plot. Unlike so many other Time Crashers, Solovyov is not on a mission of historical import. He is not intervening in a battle, preventing a war, averting a catastrophe, or advising a leader. Arguably, this is a more appropriate use of the Brezhnev-era setting than turning it into the last chance to save the USSR. To the extent that this Period of Stagnation has taken a nostalgic hold in the popular consciousness, it is precisely as a time when an ordinary, uneventful life was possible. Where dissidents were stymied by the near impossibility of inciting any kind of meaningful change, many post-Soviet Russians find real comfort.

The low stakes are also a function of the show’s generic hybridity. Like its prototype, The Dark Side of the Moon slowly advances its fantastic premise over the course of a season, the individual episodes of which function primarily according to the conventions of the police procedural. For many Time Crashers, the trip to the past is the moment when they trade in their dull, everyday lives for a heroic role that could previously only have been the stuff of daydreams: the office worker becomes an action hero. But Solovyov is a police detective; he already is an action hero. The series continually highlights the differences between Soviet-era militia practices and twenty-first-century police work, but the comparison rests on the fact that, by and large, Solovyov is doing the same job in each time period.⁷

The Dark Side of the Moon continually teases the viewers with the possibility that the whole time-displacement story line takes place entirely in his head. In 1979, Solovyov gets brief communications from doctors and friends sitting by his comatose body in 2011. It is no stretch to imagine the show as an expression of Solovyov’s fantasy. But the fantasy is primarily personal, centered around his childhood and his parents. More often than not, Time Crasher tales are personal in an entirely different way, functioning as heroic fantasy projections involving an authorial stand-in. If, as I suggested earlier, Time Crasher stories are fan fiction whose fandom is history, their heroes often resemble a familiar fan fiction type known as the “Mary Sue.”

Mary Sue is the teenage protagonist of the 1973 Star Trek fan fiction parody “A Trekkie’s Tale,” written by the fanzine editor Paula Smith (1974). The youngest officer in Starfleet, Mary Sue solves every problem she faces over the course of the ten-paragraph story, even taking over the bridge from Captain Kirk while he runs out to get them coffee. When she dies, she is surrounded by all the show’s protagonists, “all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all-around niceness. Even to this day her birthday is a national holiday on the Enterprise.” Smith came up with Mary Sue in response to the countless story submissions she received featuring protagonists who were idealized self-insertions of the author into a beloved fan universe. The name quickly became a term for this type of character, with fans simultaneously embracing it as the recognition of a familiar, widely loathed trope while also expressing concern that it could easily be used for the sexist dismissal of any competent female character.

Time Crashers rarely match the classic Mary Sue in sheer insufferability (though Arsenyev’s heroines come close), probably because their effectiveness under their new circumstances owes less to their innate superiority than to the power granted by hindsight. Coming from the future, they have the advantage thanks to knowledge of the past and, occasionally, either a greater facility with technology or the assistance of the near-magical laptops that somehow keep working in their new, inhospitable environments. Their superiority is almost democratic. Virtually anyone who stayed awake during history class and is also handy with tools could do just as well.

The classic Mary Sue is, as her name suggests, female, reflecting fan fiction’s largely female demographic; Time Crashers, by contrast, skew male. There are, of course, plenty of male Mary Sues (referred to by various masculine names, such as “Gary Stu”). But the self-insertion practiced by Time Crasher authors need not be a matter of self-aggrandizement; the protagonists of Save the USSR! and its ilk are more like the passive heroes of Russian fairy tales, who need magical helpers in order to save the day. As heroes, they represent the triumph of a particular kind of male mediocrity.

In these Time Crasher stories, the protagonist can be both authorial stand-in and cypher, since the true hero is more setting than person. The protagonist exists in order to allow the reader’s consciousness to move back in time with him, looking at the past from the privileged vantage point of the present in the hopes of intervening in the course of history. The Dark Side of the Moon frames its hero’s involvement in history as more than simply the solution of an intellectual puzzle, downplaying the historical questions in favor of a personal, Oedipal soap opera that, in turn, comments on the historical machinations of the Time Crasher narrative. Rewriting the past is tantamount to rewriting the self, hence the prevalence of the grandfather paradox in more traditional time travel stories.

Time Crashers and the Hidden Hand of History

Dark Side of the Moon does its best to frame its (and Solovyov’s) interventions in Soviet history as apolitical. True, the second season is set in an alternate future Solovyov accidentally created while still in the 1970s, but, as we see in chapter 4, this seems to have been a late addition to the show’s trajectory. Instead, the first season insists on treating politically loaded topics as entirely neutral (Khodorkovsky, the petty “crimes” that would now be an ordinary part of capitalism). The show seems to withhold judgment and encourage the viewers to do this same. This is not only an inherently political gesture; it is also a hallmark of early to mid-Putinism (the Medvedev years), whose unofficial motto was, “Let’s not talk about politics.”

Nonetheless, politics and ideology are inevitably implicated. Time travel stories are generally wrapped up in the question of free will, either by suggesting that the future is set in stone or by stressing the importance of even the most seemingly insignificant action on the course of history (the Butterfly Effect). Time Crasher stories can do this as well, but they add a layer of uncertainty about basic human agency. Time Crashers rarely embark on their journey intentionally, and almost never do they (or the reader) understand how the trip is happening. Time Crashers are puppets with visible strings that lead nowhere.

Who, after all, is pulling the strings? The obvious, extradiegetic answer is the author or authors, who know that the genre conventions allow them to leave the process unexplained. But the resulting uncertainly makes Time Crashers a particularly noteworthy post-Soviet genre. As I have argued in Plots against Russia, the media and chattering classes are always looking to assign intent and blame to malign, shadowy forces (99–132). Consumers of Time Crasher tales, in contrast, are tacitly encouraged to accept a cosmos that, at first glance, is either random or mechanistic, with nary a satanic schemer in sight. They have heeded the advice of the Wizard of Oz and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

But sometimes the plot device that sends the hero on his cross-time journey gives a glimpse behind the scenes, because, like the fabled Wizard, that plot device is actually a person. This is the case in Valery Rozhnov’s four-part miniseries Back to the USSR (Nazad v SSSR [2010]). Like most of our examples so far, Back to the USSR is unlikely to be celebrated as a cinematic masterpiece, even if multiple creators are at pains to claim authorship.⁸ A cliché-ridden melodrama about Anton Rodimov, a thirty-something, hard-partying oligarch who can no longer bear the emptiness of his consumption-driven existence, Back to the USSR offers its hero the standard alternative afforded the protagonists of the Time Crasher genre: the opportunity to go back to a simpler, purer time. His best friend sends him to an AA meeting, where he meets a man called Stalker, whose offer of the adventure of a lifetime turns out to include time travel. Beaten in an alley by thugs, Anton wakes up in 1975.

The usual hijinks ensue. Anton doesn’t believe he’s really in the past but is quickly befriended by a beautiful young woman named Natasha, with whom he, of course, falls in love. He spends some time in a mental hospital but escapes, and even finds himself mistaken for the son of a local party official destined for great things. Along the way, Anton discovers the joys of a simpler life in a simpler time, before a second head injury sends him back to the present.

There is only one thing that distinguishes Back to the USSR from the many stories it resembles: Anton discovers that it was all a lie. He never traveled in time. The entire scenario was arranged by the Stalker at the behest of Anton’s best friend, who was desperate to shake him out of his alcoholic torpor. The people he met, Natasha included, were actors hired to make the illusion seem real. Anton eventually tracks down Natasha while she is performing on stage and discovers that the one thing that proves to have been real was their love.

So Back to the USSR turns out not to be a Time Crasher story at all. Instead, it is the story of people pretending to be in a Time Crasher story, placing Back to the USSR in the generic company of other quasi-therapeutic mind games set against the backdrop of late capitalist anomie, such as The Game and Fight Club, not to mention the total simulation of an American retrograde utopia that deceived the eponymous hero of The Truman Show.⁹ Besides the lack of actual time travel, this very different genre has much more stringent requirements for verisimilitude and explanation. Audiences might accept some vague nonsense involving fog, head injuries, or explosions to justify actual time travel but could not be expected to accept a scenario in which a trip to the past somehow fakes itself. There has to be a somewhat plausible mechanism, as well as a reason to bother.

Curiously, the revelation of the miniseries’ prosaic nature only highlights the story’s resemblance to a more fantastic genre—namely, the fairy tale. The Stalker is a variation on one of the most common folkloric tropes identified by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folk Tale: the magical helper without whom the hero could never solve his problem. In Back to the USSR, the helper role is doubled, since the Stalker is merely the agent of Anton’s true helper, his friend. At the same time, the magical helper’s function might seem less benign on a meta-level: he is the reason we have spent nearly four hours being deceived about the actual plot. We are also forced to reevaluate our assessment of the accuracy with which the series recreates 1975, since now it no longer has to completely convince the audience at the same time it convinces the hero. Any anachronisms committed by the filmmakers can be chalked up to the inadequacy of the Stalker as a reenactor.

In pretending to be a Time Crasher tale, Back to the USSR ends up using the idea of time travel as a moral and psychological justification for the historical reenactments that have become increasingly popular since the Soviet collapse. The simple fact of occupying the role of Soviet subject is an antidote to the spiritual rot of neoliberal Russia. The plight of the alienated individual (here, Anton) is one of context and relations; in placing himself in a world beyond the cash nexus and interacting with people who are supposedly motivated by something other than money, he can become a better version of himself. Never mind the fact that the people he meets are actually actors doing work for hire; he experiences them as people who are not at all mercenary, and Natasha’s love for him turns out to be more than a mere act. Even Soviet faux-sincerity, though purchased with money, is better than what the real world has to offer.

If, by the end, Anton has found true love through fake time travel, then the Stalker and the best friend are more than just magical helpers; they are practically fairy godmothers. Like Cinderella, Anton meets his prince(ss) under false pretenses but manages to rescue a happy ending from the wreckage of fantasy. Is Back to the USSR anomalous not just for its plot twist but for the visibility of the fairy godmother’s magic wand?

Propp’s structuralist approach to fairy tales, which supplied us with the term “magical helper,” may turn out to be a magical helper in its own right. Propp identified the various functions that make up the basis of a given fairy tale but may be absent from a given iteration of the story. Cinderella might have two sisters in one telling, and three in another; one of them might hack away at her oversized foot to try to fit it into the slipper, while others may not. The Time Crasher genre is a hybrid of both “legitimately” authored fiction (published by presses or produced by film studios) and a vast amount of online amateur fan fiction that occasionally crosses over into the mainstream and is, in any case, highly formulaic—a bit of structuralism (in carefully measured doses) might be illuminating.

And this is why Back to the USSR is so valuable. Who would be more cognizant of the underlying formula than authors who are essentially parodying it? There are actual Time Crasher stories that have a magical helper figure like the Stalker. Save the USSR!, for example, has a mysterious figure who sends the hero back to the 1970s and then disappears from the novel. Boris Akunin’s play The Mirror of St. Germain, in contrast, involves swapping two men from New Year’s Eve 1900 and New Year’s Eve 2000 and has the titular St. Germain (among others) playing a similar role. Continuing in our formalist/structuralist vein, these stories lay bare the device behind the time travel in this genre. The magical helper figure is in the deep structure of the Time Crasher narrative.

Even in Time Crasher stories with minimal or no explanation for time travel, the magical helper is implicit, in that the trip to the past is usually beneficial both to the traveler and to the world. The Time Crasher, as we have seen, tends to become a better person through his experience, attaining a moral clarity that his home time period would obscure. While in the past, he either ensures that history moves along its proper course or changes it in order to create a better future.

Thus the apparent randomness of the travel as experienced by the Time Crasher must be understood as evidence not of the arbitrary nature of the universe but of a benevolent (fictional) cosmos striving for improvement. More than that, though, it is the cosmos’s way of negating the evils of our present. Whether that present is understood as a harsh, meaningless world of late capitalist savagery or (as is more often the case) the result of the concerted efforts of evil forces, the implied magical helper is acting in the best interest of both his hero and his world. As the instrument of the author’s often tendentious worldview, the helper’s ability to right all wrongs is a wish-fulfillment fantasy familiar from fan fiction: the magical helper is the hidden hand of Mary Sue.

Sleep to the Future

As fantasies go, the majority of Time Crasher stories are regressive. In sending the hero back through history, they combine nostalgia for a simpler or more heroic time with an implied or explicit critique of the present day. Kirill Kobrin and Mark Lipovetsky (“Strakh nastoiashchego”) have pointed out that even the present has been an unpopular setting for much of post-Soviet literature, which seems to prefer the recent and distant historical past.

There are other reasons for their appeal, of course. A narrative sandwich of historical and science fiction, they hit an intergeneric sweet spot. The world building required by the author has the advantage of clarity. Doing research on World War II might be daunting, but it does not require coming up with a whole new world from scratch. More to the point, the first few post-Soviet decades have not made imagining the future easy. This is particularly a problem for the near future. What does it mean to project Russia into the 2030s or 2040s when it’s all but impossible to imagine the simple fact of presidential succession, which always threatens to turn a political process into an existential question?

For whatever reasons, Time Crashers rarely end up in the future. Perhaps this is because they do not have a well-defined role to play in imagining the world to come. What possible mission could they be asked to accomplish that would be comparable to their typical role in stories based in the past?

Western science fiction has long provided an answer to this question, but it is usually based on a dystopian scenario. John Barlow, the protagonist of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s 1951 “The Marching Morons,” is a con man thawed out in a future world overrun by idiots who force the few intelligent people left to work on their behalf. Barlow uses his public relations (PR) wiles to launch a scheme that tricks the morons into voluntarily signing up for mass extermination. The 1973 film Sleeper features Woody Allen as a jazz musician awakened to a tyrannical police state two hundred years in the future, so that he can help launch a revolution. And, of course, Mike Judge’s 2006 Idiocracy, whose hero wakes up from a five-hundred-year nap to discover a vapid and stupid America run by President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, took only a decade to start looking prophetic.

There is an appealing symmetry here with the Russian Time Crasher genre. Just as the Time Crashers endlessly recycle the conceit of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the accidental freezing and defrosting of a man from “our” time in the future recalls both Rip van Winkle and Edward Bellamy’s classic 1888 utopia novel, Looking Backward. Contemporary Russian science fiction rarely avails itself of this trope, at least for tales set in the future.¹⁰ Yuri Burnosov’s “Moscow 22” is an exception, but its hero needs only an eight-year coma to awaken to a “nightmare” world in which everyone is forced to be gay.¹¹

Burnosov’s vision of compulsory homosexuality is instructive, though perhaps not in the way the author intended. Utopias so often are created to reflect the particular concerns of the times in which they were written. In the wake of the British enclosure laws, Thomas More’s Utopia spends more time talking about the allocation of agricultural lands than the average urban twenty-first-century reader might care to read. Burnosov needs the reaction of a “normal” contemporary to express outrage at what he clearly wants the reader to see as the inevitable outcome of tolerance run wild.¹² A Time Crasher ends up in the future because he bears a value or has an ability that will be lost, whether it be the rugged heroism of Buck Rogers or the unscrupulous genius of a Fifties’ con man.¹³ There is a peculiar kind of positivity to these seemingly pessimistic scenarios, since they are predicated on the idea that our present has something to offer the future. This is the antithesis of the moral logic that catapults the protagonist out of the morally compromised present into the past for the purpose of spiritual improvement. Yet it is not the sort of imaginative leap that comes naturally to post-Soviet writers of fantasy and science fiction.

Flyover Country

Dystopian futures, like the utopias that originally inspired the genre, descend from the tradition of satire, often exaggerating a contemporary trend or vice as a comment or cautionary tale. Usually, the object of satire is clear enough to a contemporary reader without any need for a fictional stand-in. Time travel becomes much more valuable as a device if the satire is focused on the present day. In that case, bringing someone from our past to their future (i.e., our present) provides endless opportunity for defamiliarization, wry commentary, and metaphysical speculation.

Bellamy’s Looking Backward provides the structural model for these sorts of tales, even as it differs from them in two important respects: (1) though the book functions as a satire of Bellamy’s present, it is deadly earnest about the world in which his hero arrives; and (2) Bellamy’s hero ends up in the reader’s future, while the works that borrow from it deposit the traveler in the present day.

The classic Soviet example of this kind of story exists in two versions that tell basically the same story. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1935–1936 play Ivan Vasilievich, a faulty time machine swaps a Soviet building superintendent with Ivan the Terrible (both men are named Ivan Vasilievich). After the legendary Russian tyrant gets over his initial shock, it turns out that he is perfectly equipped for navigating Stalinist reality. In 1973, the director Leonid Gaidai adapted the play into a film called Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession (sometimes called Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future in English), performing an additional feat of time travel by moving the action from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The visitor from the past forces us to look at the present with new eyes: our time turns out to truly be a “brave new world,” in both the original Shakespearean sense and Huxley’s ironic, dystopian spin on the phrase. The present is both magical and horrible, in a manner that rarely fails to be instructive.

The Rip van Winkle scenario is the point of departure for one of the most celebrated Russian novels of the early twenty-first century: Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator. The novel’s premise is simple: born in 1900, Innokenty Petrovich Platonov is frozen as part of a life-extension experiment in the Gulag in the 1930s, only to be defrosted and revived in 1999. After suffering from amnesia, he slowly acclimates himself to his new environment, with the help of his physician, Dr. Geiger, and, eventually, his young wife, Nastya, the granddaughter of the now-nonagenarian love of his life, Anastasia. By the end of the novel, he is beset by the symptoms of a terminal post-thaw mental decline, and when last we see him, he may be facing death in a plane crash.

A powerful novel in its own right, The Aviator looks even better in comparison to the works it superficially resembles. Not just the Time Crasher genre, though we will certainly get to that, but also its older utopian and dystopian precursors. Bellamy’s Looking Backward, for example, not only shares the same basic premise but even involves a similar jump in time. It also features an incredibly simplistic trope that is developed, if not entirely redeemed, by The Aviator. When Julian West awakens in the year 2000, he is forever separated from his fiancée, Edith Bartlett, but finds solace in the arms of her great-granddaughter, Edith Leete. Where Bellamy seems perfectly happy to render the two Ediths entirely fungible (as if they were just another commodity to be found in the socialist Costcos Julian so admires), Vodolazkin (and Innokenty) is careful to recognize them as distinct individuals. In its depiction of the slow return of Innokenty’s memories followed by his cognitive decline, The Aviator also resembles Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (with which it shares its diary format).

The diary (which also includes notes by Nastya and Geiger) is the formal manifestation of the primary distinction between The Aviator and the works we examined the previous chapter. Time Crasher stories often privilege the big events, the turning points in history, subsuming everyday life into the project of righting historical wrongs. The Aviator, too, is concerned with history (history being one of the primary preoccupations of nearly all of Vodolazkin’s work), and the choice of the Gulag as the site of Innokenty’s cryogenic suspension firmly roots the story in one of the most important, and shameful, moments in the Soviet era. But the Gulag does not make up the majority of Innokenty’s reminiscences (which tend to be about the years prior to his arrest). Even more important, Innokenty firmly and consistently rejects any attempt to frame his life within the grand narratives of history. When people ask him to describe the past, he argues that they already know about the big events; what he can describe is how it felt to live during that time. He focuses on the sounds, the smells, and all the things that words on paper could not have preserved. His interest in reproducing the sheer dailyness of the past is perfectly mirrored in his descriptions of everything novel he finds in the dailiness of 1999.

The Aviator, unlike the Time Crasher stories, paints a picture of sudden, involuntary time travel as disruptive rather than restorative. As Innokenty writes early in the novel: “A person is not a cat and cannot land on four paws wherever thrown. A person is placed in a certain historical time for some reason. What happens when someone loses that?” (86). Time Crashers are heroic, but Innokenty, once he has had the chance to brush up on the last seven decades of history, causes a small stir at a public event when he rejects the Russian president’s comparison of his travel in time to Gagarin’s orbit in space: “I’m afraid I do not deserve the comparison with Gagarin … because my courage was forced. It is probably more akin to the courage of Belka and Strelka, who also had no other choice” (258).

In rejecting the heroic paradigm, Vodolazkin (via Innokenty) puts the maximum distance between his own work and the historical wish-fulfillment fantasies that have come to prominence in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Innokenty is no Mary Sue, and The Aviator is not historical fan fiction. When it comes to twentieth-century history, neither Innokenty nor Vodolazkin could be called a fan. By the same token, the novel resists using Innokenty to become the equivalent of the grumpy old man complaining about today’s world. Yes, Innokenty cannot help but notice the tackiness of contemporary society, particularly the media, nor is he blind to the younger Nastya’s materialistic streak. But Innokenty is not interested in rendering judgment on post-Soviet Russia; instead, he subjects it to the same keen powers of observation he deploys when writing about the past.

In The Aviator, Vodolazkin employs the tropes of the Time Crasher tale much as a trial lawyer questions a hostile witness. The tropes are essential for building his case (his novel), primarily because their own inherent weaknesses make his points for him. There is nothing heroic about Innokenty’s survival, just as there is no particular reason to expect the average Time Crasher to be able to save the world simply because he has traveled in time. The fact that, of all the test subjects, he is the one to survive is a happy accident, and it does not give him any particular mission to fulfill once he is awakened in the twenty-first century. What Innokenty does have (and what most Time Crashers sorely lack) is a personal sensibility whose collision with a new time period is rewarding to observe. And even that sensibility (which is the heart of the novel) is fragile, threatened with total deterioration in the novel’s last pages.

The Aviator is not the Time Crasher novel to end all Time Crasher novels. For one thing, like the dystopias written by mainstream authors who otherwise disdain science fiction, it is not engaged in a conscious dialogue with a genre that I can only assume would hold little appeal for a sophisticated writer of literary fiction like Vodolazkin. Even the audience that makes up the Venn diagram of the intersection between Time Crasher fans and Vodolazkin readers might not make the connection, since The Aviator is not designed to provide the pleasures readers of Vodolazkin are likely to seek when they pick up a hard-core Time Crasher novel. Instead, The Aviator builds an inadvertent critique of Time Crashers by interrogating the naïve conceptions of history underlying both the smaller phenomenon of the Time Crasher genre and the larger forces that help ensure the genre’s popularity.

Post-Soviet nostalgia, the cult of World War II, the rehabilitation of Brezhnev’s Stagnation years, and even the endless discussion of Russia’s “historical mission” all share the same defective reasoning. They all reduce historical eras to hyperreal simulacra of themselves, in which one or two broad features define virtually everything. They all assume that history is guided by a teleological impulse, whether it be God’s plan, national destiny, or simple determinism. There are no accidents, and any pattern we can see in history is evidence that it follows laws that can be known and explained. This determinism is facilitated by what might seem to be its opposite: the crucial role played by the heroic individual in the right place at the right time. The “great man” and determinism prove to be dialectical, easily mapped onto the spontaneity/consciousness dialectic of socialist realism. The individual’s intervention in history serves only to underscore the extent to which he and history shape each other, ultimately reinforcing the individual’s identification with his country’s historical past and future destiny.

Vodolazkin, of course, is having none of this. When his protagonist moves forward in time, it is hugely disruptive, but it does not change the nature of his relationship to historical events, whether they are now in the past or are unfolding in the present day. As a child, he dreamed of being an aviator, but he is, instead, what most people are when they are on an airplane: a passenger, albeit one whose powers of observation make all his journeys intriguing to follow. By the end of the novel, when he is literally on a plane, he may be about to crash. Or he may not. Either way, there is nothing he can do about it.

1. See, for example, Oleksandr Zabirko: “The typical Russian popadanets is usually preoccupied with saving and strengthening a metaphysical Russian statehood, which may appear in any of its historical incarnations. The dominant theme and most frequently applied historical setting is the Second World War, which resonates with the Soviet concept of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ as the main legitimizing narrative of the Soviet Union.”

2. On the successes and failures of some of these adaptations, see Bonaut and Ojer; Lavery; and Mills.

3. The fact that the young Solovyov has his father’s first name makes the connection between their identities all the stronger.

4. The original Life on Mars also contrasts 1970s’ police practices with their contemporary counterparts. Andy Willis (57–62) argues that, despite the numerous instances of corruption featured in the show, the depiction of late twentieth-century policing in Life on Mars reinforces a conservative framework for the failings of the police in today’s United Kingdom.

5. Solovyov’s foreknowledge of the invasion becomes a plot point in the first season when he wins a large amount of money betting that the Taraki government in Afghanistan will be toppled. This event occurred on September 16; the invasion itself took place on December 24, after the events of Season 1.

6. As Amanda Lerner notes, changing the series title from a Bowie song (“Life on Mars”) to a Pink Floyd album makes sense, since the latter group had a much bigger following in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. This also brings Dark Side closer to one of the elements that made the British original a success: its deployment of beloved, period-appropriate music, something the North American version failed to do (88).

7. Coming from 2011, Solovyov is almost too much of an action hero for 1979. As Lerner notes, “One of the markers of the first episode of Dark Side of the Moon is Solov’ev’s hurriedness, his inability to take things slowly … Those around him—particularly the doctors and nurses he encounters in the halls of the hospital—seem perturbed by his instinctive urge to rush” (105).

8. Valerii Rozhnov wrote and directed the film, but Oleg Ulanov claims that the studio plagiarized his then-unpublished novel Unusual Travel Agent (Agenty nestandartnogo otdykha, eventually released along with a sequel). Rozhnov not only denied the allegation but produced his own novel based on his screenplay (Rudenko).

9. See Fedotov.

10. Vladimir Voinovich brings the protagonist forward in time in his 1986 satire, Moscow 2042, with the help of a West German trans-temporal travel agency, although he does include a thinly veiled parody of a cryogenically preserved Alexander Solzhenitsyn, revived in 2042 in order to try to bring back tsarism.

11. I describe this story in more detail in Plots against Russia (174).

12. A similar conceit can be found in two pro-Putin online commercials. In 2018, a middle-aged man dreams that, because people like him didn’t bother to vote in the upcoming election, now families like his are required to host unattached gay men and even share their beds with them. Two years later, another commercial shows a near future in which a young orphan boy is adopted by a gay male couple, one of whom says to call him “mama” before presenting him with a dress and makeup.

13. Occasionally a writer will split the difference, sending someone from our past into our future. In his discussion of Stalingrad in contemporary Russian science fiction, Ian Garner highlights Oleg Tarugin and Aleksei Ivakin’s novel duology The Shtrafbat’s Constellation, in which the “best soldiers in history” are brought from the 1940s to 2297, where they can bring the experience and spirit of Stalingrad to bear on the struggle against the lizard people who threaten to wipe out human civilization.