Scheduling Conflicts

On or about December 1991, the normal course of time in Russia stopped. To put it more precisely, the normal course of time in the Soviet Union ended along with the country itself, leaving Russia and the other fourteen successor states to reset their clocks for a new era. Not literally, of course, although the Russian state would occasionally tinker with the metaphorical timepieces established by the USSR.

Among the many aspects of the Soviet Union inherited by the Russian Federation was a voluntarist approach to time. In 1930, all clocks in the Soviet Union were moved ahead one hour, a phenomenon known as “decree time” (“Stat’ia No. 362”). Though the change was motivated by practicality, what could be more symbolic of the USSR’s status as the harbinger of the future? It was rolled back in the Russian Federation in the mid-1980s, only to be restored just one month after the December accords that wiped the Soviet Union from the face of the earth (“Postanovlenie Sovmina”; “Postanovlenie Pravitel’stva RF”). The Soviet Union also had daylight saving time, which was made permanent in Russia in 2011 (i.e., the country sprang forward without falling back), and then abolished in 2014 (falling back, never to spring forward again) (“Russian Clocks Go Back for Last Time”).

From an outsider’s perspective, time in the USSR was never straightforward. Even setting aside the five-year plans (and the calls to fulfill them in four) or the early Soviet emphasis on speed (Valentin Kataev’s 1933 novel, Time, Forward!, starts with “Chapter 1: The first chapter is omitted for the time being” [2]), experiments with the everyday experience of time were a recurring feature of Soviet life. In 1929, the USSR instituted the nepreryvka, the endless workweek with no set days off for the weekend. (Workers were assigned to different shifts with different days of rest) (Henkin 4). An unsurprising failure, the practice was revised into a six-day week in 1931, and the country reverted to a five-day week in 1940. Another innovation, working a twenty-four-hour shift every three days, has remained a fixture of many Russians’ schedules (Tiapukhin).

In some areas, the centrality of Moscow led to a time frame that completely ignored conditions on the ground. Until 2018, all train schedules in the Russian Federation (and, previously, in the Soviet Union) indicated arrival and departure in Moscow time (Shadrina). Never mind that the country has eleven time zones. On vacation in Lithuania in 1992, I realized that I could not be sure what time my return train was actually scheduled to depart: the ticketing seemed exactly the same as the old tickets, but Vilnius and Moscow were now in different time zones. For the time being, it turned out that Moscow time still reigned. In preparation to fly back to Moscow from Tomsk in 1993, I was surprised to find that the moment I passed security and entered into the waiting area for my flight, I was on Moscow time; the clocks were four hours behind the ones on the other side of the gate.

Other aspects of the Soviet, and now Russian, calendar are also inflexible. The official first day of school is September 1, even if that date falls on a Saturday or a Sunday—the exact opposite of the often-confounding American custom of scheduling certain holidays, such as Thanksgiving, by day of the week, rather than date.¹ Flexibility is instead the province of the religious holidays that have become more prominent since the Soviet collapse: the Russian Orthodox Church, like many other religious traditions, has a number of movable feasts.

Post-Soviet Russia had its share of calendrical decisions to make, beyond the aforementioned reforms of decree time and daylight savings. Holidays were renamed: “Soviet Army and Navy Day” became “Defender of the Fatherland Day,” and “International Workers’ Day” became “The Day of Spring and Labor.” The Russian Federation made June 12, the date that the Russian Parliament declared sovereignty in 1991, a national holiday in 1992. Initially “Day of the Adoption of Sovereignty of the Russian Federation,” it became “Russia Day” in 2002. In 2005, the country adopted November 4 as “Unity Day,” an old imperial holiday commemorating the 1612 expulsion of Polish invaders. Clearly meant to displace the Soviet holiday of October Revolution Day (November 7), it has an additional significance to which we will return shortly.

The real disruption to the normal flow of time, however, was less about formal measurements and work schedules than it was about the country’s relationship to its past, its understanding of the present, and the ability to imagine a future.

Russia had come unstuck in time.

Time of Troubles, or, the Trouble with Time

In the prologue to his classic utopian novel Red Mars (1992), Kim Stanley Robinson describes the adjustment human colonists have made to the clocks on their new world:

And then it was ringing midnight, and they were in the Martian time slip, the thirty-nine-and-a-half-minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, when all the clocks went blank or stopped moving. This was how [the colonists] had decided to reconcile Mars’s slightly longer day with the twenty-four-hour clock, and the solution had proved oddly satisfactory. Every night to step for a while out of the flicking numbers, out of the remorseless sweep of the second hand—²

The Martian time slip was a way of stepping outside of ordinary time while also acknowledging its passing. Within this gap, it felt as if they had slipped loose from time entirely, even though some mechanism was clearly keeping track of those thirty-nine and a half minutes in order to resume the ordinary chronology once the slip elapsed. The Martian time slip is a temporal state of exception, an exclusion that helps constitute the (counting) system from which it purports to be absent.

Human experience is filled with such times, moments that are counted and uncounted simultaneously—whether they be the sacred time of sabbaths and cyclical holidays; the timeless encounters with the numinous facilitated by meditation, prayer, or hallucinogens; or the fuzzy semiconsciousness of sleep. Then there are historical periods defined primarily by their absence of definition, epistemological chaos, and general sense of falling outside of ordinary history. This is the interregnum.

In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci extrapolated from the dictionary definition of interregnum to define it as the period when the existing social order is no longer functional, but its replacement has yet to materialize (276). Zygmunt Bauman (“Times of Interregnum”) and Carlo Bordoni (Interregnum) have extended the concept further, applying it to the economic, environmental, and governance crises that characterize the first decades of the twenty-first century. While both of these reinterpretations of interregnum have undeniable value, for the Russian Federation in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, it is nonetheless worth retaining at least some of the term’s literal meaning. Not only does it work retrospectively for the period between 1991 and Putin’s revival of supreme central authority, but it also corresponds with the earlier Russian historical era that has provided a metaphorical model for periods of chaos and confusion: the Time of Troubles.

The Time of Troubles began in 1598, when the tsar died without an heir, leading to a succession crisis complete with famine, two imposters claiming to be the tsar’s dead son, war with Poland, and foreign occupation by Poland-Lithuania. It ended in 1613 with the election of Mikhail Romanov as tsar and the inauguration of the dynasty that shared his last name. Memorialized most notably in Pushkin’s (and Mussorgsky’s) Boris Godunov, the Time of Troubles has remained current, both as an available phrase and a point of reference, and its application to the chaotic, impoverished, crime-ridden 1990s was inevitable. As Russian scholars and media figures have begun to reexamine the Nineties, the appropriateness of this comparison has been (rightfully) called into question.³ As I argued in Plots against Russia, the framing of the Nineties as a decade of hell has been a cornerstone of the myth of Vladimir Putin as the country’s savior (107–10).

But there is a difference between calling the decade a Time of Troubles retrospectively and calling it by that name while the “Troubles” are still unfolding. In addition to the everyday struggles arising from economic and social breakdown, the true horror of living in such an interregnum is the collapse of teleology. When is all this going to end, and how? Soviet ideology, while it remained current, justified any number of sacrifices in the name of the promised radiant future, either draining the present of all meaning or imbuing it with significance based entirely on what was supposed to come. Perestroika promised improvement (reform) and eventually the replacement of an old system with a new one. But the 1990s offered only vague talk of democracy and markets, peppered with incomprehensible imported jargon that failed to obscure the extent to which the overwhelming majority of the population was getting railroaded. Instead of a grand narrative with a goal in sight, the 1990s offered endless iterations of meaningless misery.

When pressed to imagine a possible end to chaos, the media and culture industry repeatedly returned to two familiar historical models: total civil war and the dictatorship of the “firm hand.” In the 1990s, Sergei Norka produced a trilogy of novels that, after explaining just who was behind Russia’s problems (the usual suspects), imagined a way out thanks to a “Russian Inquisition” that would bring an authoritarian nicknamed the “Dark Horse” to power (Borenstein, Plots against Russia 83–88). The best outcome was a replay of history, whether Russian or more generally European.

The very metaphor of the Time of Troubles presupposes that chaos ends only through the reinstitution of strong central rule. In that regard, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. But the fact that the Yeltsin Era would officially end with the last moments of 1999 was by no means guaranteed. While this is one of those rare instances when the calendar and the popular sense of the period prove to be in near-perfect alignment, the inauguration of what would eventually be seen as the Putin Era came as a complete surprise to the families gathered around their televisions for the traditional new year’s greetings from the country’s leader. Nor did Yeltsin’s statement, “I’m leaving. I’ve done all I could,” sound particularly momentous—let alone the phrase as it is misremembered in the popular consciousness and Internet memes: “I’m tired. I’m leaving”) (Bormatova).

Thus the Time of Troubles works for the 1990s both because of the retrospective ability to see it as a distinct historical era and the contemporary experience during the 1990s of an unstructured time with no end in sight. As an interregnum, it is a discrete period with a beginning and end that nonetheless describe a time marked by a sense of total timelessness. The 1990s were the Moscow time slip.

Time out of Joint

Like the book you are currently reading, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five contains multiple beginnings, as if the author is not quite ready to get started. According to the end of chapter 1, the book starts in chapter 2, with this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.

According to the novel, Billy Pilgrim died in 1976. Had he lived ten more years, he could have encountered his fictional heir, Jon Osterman, the physicist in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen (1987) who, after being transformed into the godlike Dr. Manhattan, moved back and forth along his personal timeline in much the same way Billy did. Both Billy Pilgrim and Dr. Manhattan are jolted out of linearity by a catastrophic event: Billy in response to his experience of the bombing of Dresden, and Dr. Manhattan through his complete disintegration and self-reconstruction in a freak lab accident. In other words, they have each been displaced by trauma. Certainly, Billy’s frequent returns to his time in World War II resemble the flashbacks that plague veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, while Dr. Manhattan’s flat affect and indifference to humanity might, in a less science fictional mode, suggest its own variation on shell shock.

Recognizing the risk of straining the metaphor beyond its breaking point, I nonetheless submit that the Soviet collapse loosed Russia from the bonds of linear time. Not literally, of course; as all the discussion of clocks a few pages ago demonstrates, empirical time continued to be tracked. Years followed one another in the customary sequence, and human bodies continued to age (in the cases of the most vulnerable, they probably aged precipitously). But the 1990s was a temporal derailment, one that sent pundits racing for historical precedent: the Time of Troubles, obviously, but also the Russian Civil War, the New Economic Policy, and the fall of Rome, among many others. Experienced as a time out of time, it would retroactively be cordoned off as a strictly delimited period of timelessness to which no one would wish to return. Its end, however, was not entirely a return to linear time.

Much of Russia’s cultural production in the twenty-first century suggests that, even if it put an end to the Time of Troubles that preceded it, the Putin Era has not been a straightforward return to linearity. Certainly, the long-standing tendency to connect the current moment with a historical precedent has been intensified. The commemoration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War II seemed designed to make the Great Patriotic War feel contemporary. Where the fiftieth anniversary in 1995 had numerous living veterans to celebrate and congratulate, the sad truth was that, with the passage of time, the commemorations would eventually be taking place in their absence. Thanks to the initiative of three journalists, the 2012 commemorations in Tomsk featured a parade of younger people displaying pictures of relatives who had served in the war. They called themselves the “Immortal Regiment,” and by the next year, similar demonstrations were mounted throughout the Russian Federation. As it happened, the spread of the Immortal Regiment coincided with the outbreak of war in Ukraine (the fighting in Donbas began a little more than a month before Victory Day 2014), facilitating the government’s propaganda campaign to frame the fighting as a replay of World War II.⁴ Ukrainian nationalists were “Banderites” (the name of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist forces who fought on the side of the Germans), as if Ukraine had somehow kept Nazis in reserve, to be awakened in an emergency by breaking their glass container. The following year, 2015, Russian motorists proudly displayed bumper stickers saying “1945—we can do it again.” By the time the coronavirus hit Russia in 2020, Putin’s habitual invocation of Russia’s historical triumphs had turned into a self-parody: “Everything passes, and this will pass. Our country has gone through many serious challenges: When tormented by the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians Russia has handled them all. We will defeat this coronavirus contagion” (“Putin Sets Off Meme Storm”).⁵

Just a few years later, Putin would appeal to a much more common historical touchstone to justify a catastrophe of his own making. When the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the president made a televised address to his country’s citizens in order to explain his decision: “If history is any guide, we know that in 1940 and early 1941 the Soviet Union went to great lengths to prevent war or at least delay its outbreak. To this end, the USSR sought not to provoke the potential aggressor until the very end by refraining or postponing the most urgent and obvious preparations it had to make to defend itself from an imminent attack. When it finally acted, it was too late … We will not make this mistake the second time. We have no right to do so” (Putin). Thus a criminal act that took place without any immediate provocation becomes justified as a defense against repeating the tragic losses of World War II.

The manipulation of Russian historical precedent for present-day political gain is rather clear-cut, as is the prominence of nostalgia in post-Soviet Russia. Indeed, the study of Russian nostalgia is something of a scholarly cottage industry, producing stellar work by Birgit Beumers, Otto Boele, Svetlana Boym, Tatiana Efremova, Lioudmila Fedorova, Ilyak Kalinin, Ilya Kukulin, Maya Nadkarni, Boris Noordenbos, Sergei Oushakine, and Olga Shevchenko, among others. Mark Lipovetsky’s “post-sots” paradigm for art that uses the tropes of socialist realism without necessarily importing the ideological content, is also an important framework for understanding post-Soviet reappropriations of the past (Lipovetsky, Postmodern Crises 169–94). But I propose something a bit different.

Circle Games

The limitations of nostalgia and, to a lesser extent, post-sots are tied to suppositions about affect: nostalgia presupposes a set of emotional responses, however complex.⁶ Focusing exclusively on the political uses of the past is also a bit narrow: even if the deployment of World War II tropes is useful to Putin, Putinism cannot explain everything. Instead, if we take a distant, bird’s eye view of all these phenomena (Putinist propaganda, nostalgia, post-sots, and contemporary Russian literature’s preference for the past over the present as identified by Lipovetsky, Kirill Kobrin, and Alexander Etkind), we see a contemporary Russia that, like Billy Pilgrim, is unstuck in time, hopping back and forth in the timeline of its past.⁷

But what about the future? The question is raised in the song I chose for the present study’s epigraph: Alexander Elin’s 2012 “Our Nuthouse Is Voting for Putin” (Nash durdom golosuet za Putina), performed by Rabfak: “Why is today yesterday and not tomorrow?” (Pochemu vmesto zavtra segodnia vchera?).

On the most obvious political level, Elin’s lyrics are targeting a backward-looking political system whose best attempts at articulating a vision of the future amount to primitive nostalgic revanchism. Not to mention the fact that the song came out during an election year, when voting Putin back into the presidency (after his interim stint as prime minister) made the equation between past and future more literal. The past was Putin, the immediate future was Putin, and after Putin? The media and the political class have proven unable to think beyond Vladimir Vladimirovich; and in any case, it looks more than likely that he will remain in office for the rest of his life. The protesters in 2011 called for a “Russia without Putin,” but his most zealous public surrogates would insist that Putin and Russia are one, and that a Russia without Putin is inconceivable. Perhaps we can chalk this up to what Timothy Snyder calls the “politics of eternity,” the insistence that nothing will ever change, but it does run up against the obvious barrier of Putin’s own mortality (8–17).

Fictional attempts to depict Russia in the future have been hampered not by political censorship but by the inability to conceive of the country in concrete, novel terms. According to Frederic Jameson, this is precisely the situation that can and should be resolved through utopian thinking: “The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break” (232).

But with the exception of a few relatively marginal movements I discuss in chapter 5, this is not the path taken by post-Soviet Russian speculative fiction. Quite the contrary: while much of the science fiction set in the far future has generic heroes and settings, when the focus is on Russia in particular, the future ends up looking like the past. Whether the postapocalyptic feudalism of Tatyana Tolstaya’s Slynx (2003) or the neo-medievalisms of Mikhail Yuriev’s The Third Empire (2006) and Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik (2006), a future Russia seems doomed to travel back and forth along its own personal timeline. At best, the future is a dead end, a notion that is sometimes expressed in space as much as it is in time. When the post-Soviet era was just beginning, Vladimir Makanin imagined a war-ravaged, near-future city where intellectuals survived by hiding in an underground bunker (Escape Hatch [Laz’], 1991); just fourteen years later, Metro 2033, Dmitry Glukhovsky’s transmedia postapocalyptic juggernaut, had all of Moscow’s human survivors living in the subway, with many of the stations strangely recapitulating nations and movements from the past: the Hanseatic League, the Nazis, the Reds.⁸

The architecture of Glukhovsky’s nightmare civilization is inadvertently instructive. By committing to the Moscow Metro as humanity’s last redoubt in Russia, he is beholden to the unique structure of the city’s underground transportation system. The map of the Moscow Metro is a variety of zigzagging, intersecting lines, as one would expect from a subway, but they are all united by the circle they intersect: the Ring Line. This combination of convoluted linearity with an endless circle could also map out the temporality of the postsocialist Russian imaginary.

Our story of postsocialist Russia’s complicated relationship with time begins with the most popular subgenre of Russian science fiction, which doesn’t even have a name in English: popadantsy. The word actually describes the heroes rather than the genre, but the heroes’ name has become the genre’s default nomenclature. Derived from the verb popast’ (in this case, to “end up somewhere” or “find yourself somewhere”), a popadanets (the singular of popadantsy) is someone who, usually through a completely mysterious or underexplained fantastic or science fictional plot device, ends up in another world, another dimension, or most often, another time. These sorts of stories have been and continue to be written by English and American authors as well, from Mark Twain’s 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 Kindred to the 1980s American television show Quantum Leap. But they are neither numerous nor popular enough to have coalesced into an identifiable genre. By “genre” I do not mean simply a set of familiar tropes (the Anglo-American stories certainly have those), but rather a set of expectations of narrative pleasures that a given exemplar of the genre should rightly fulfill.

Finding a satisfying English term for rendering popadantsy has been a challenge; the title of chapter 2 characterizes them as “accidental historical tourists,” an awkward phrase that gives me no sense of translator’s pride. I’ve toyed with borrowing from the title of a 1960s Doctor Who serial and calling them “time meddlers” but find it unsatisfactory. It suggests more agency than is often appropriate. Doctor Who nonetheless came to my rescue (as it usually does), thanks to the title of a 2007 eight-minute “mini-episode” starring the actors who played the fifth and tenth Doctors. An accidental collision between their two TARDISes throws them together, a rare event given that they are from different eras. The episode’s title? “Time Crash.” I propose calling popadantsy “Time Crashers”; the phrase highlights the accidental nature of the travel and fits with the Russian term’s etymology: popadat’/popast’ has the root used for a variety of verbs involving falling, while the Russian equivalent of “being hit by a car” is to popadat’/popast’ pod mashinu (“to end up/fall under a car”). To crash something in English is also to arrive uninvited, which certainly characterizes the journey of the average popadanets. So Time Crashers they shall be.

Time Crasher stories play out on the cusp of two more familiar fantasy and science fiction subgenres: time travel and alternate history. Certainly, these are time travel stories, but they tend to be about visiting (and often staying at) only one particular point in history and are almost always the result of an accident. Few of the most familiar pleasures of hard-core time travel tales are to be found—no one is at all bothered by the idea of paradoxes resulting from the deaths of butterflies, grandfathers, or Hitlers. There is little or no reflection on the philosophy of time or causality, and the general preference for points in the national history is almost as distinctive as the lack of interest in the future.⁹

One could, perhaps, look at Time Crashers as the fulfillment of an unconscious bias built in to the (nonparadoxical) grandfather of all modern time travel stories, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). As Wells’s traveler goes farther and farther into the future, he is presumably telling us what happens to our world, but geographically his machine never goes much beyond the London basement where it was constructed. The Time Machine literalizes the trope of British “insularity,” projecting it across the ages through its absolute conviction that a few hundred square meters of English soil are representative of the world at large. The most popular Time Crasher stories dispense with the pretense of speaking for the entire globe, though their chosen arena is much greater than the footprint of even the wealthiest English home: their world is Russia.

By the same token, Time Crashers cannot be simply assimilated to the category of alternate history, despite the genre’s popularity around the world and in Russia in particular. While alternate history certainly can involve time travel, it does not have to. Look no farther than the genre’s foundational work, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), in which the Axis wins World War II. Dick’s novel speculates about the fictionality of its own scenario but does not move back and forth between timelines (a possibility raised by the finale of the television adaptation’s first season). Instead, Time Crashers are a variation of what Farah Mendelsohn calls “portal quest fantasy,” where characters find doorways to other worlds (Narnia, Oz); only here the other worlds are almost always the historical past. They are portal quest historical fiction, like Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, whose goal is often the creation of an alternate history. They are the subject of chapters 1 and 2.

Tomorrow’s Soviet Union Today

In the early 1990s, one of the Russian Federation’s national evening news programs wrapped up its broadcast each night with the weather forecast. Names of cities would scroll across the screen, accompanied by an instrumental cover of The Beatles’ classic song, “Yesterday.” Apparently, no one at the station was troubled by the fact that their predictions for tomorrow were set to a melody about the previous day. While this mismatch might not have bolstered confidence in meteorology, it did inadvertently presage the wave of nostalgia that would start washing over the country by the decade’s end. Why couldn’t tomorrow look more like yesterday? For that matter, couldn’t we get started on this today?

Once again, as with the Time Crashers, popular entertainment’s response involves something adjacent to alternate history. The Time Crasher stories are also not exactly alternate history, but one of the more popular plot lines featuring them is about making an alternate imperial history possible: going back in time and preventing the collapse of the Soviet Union. In such stories, a thriving twenty-first-century USSR is a fairy-tale happily-ever-after; it need not be described in detail but merely has to happen.

This does not mean that a healthy Soviet Union that has lived to see its centenary has not captured some part of the Russian artistic imagination. Like the now established steampunk genre, which can include a present-day or future quasi-Victorian or Edwardian world extrapolated from mechanical rather than digital technology, Russia has begun producing imagery and stories about a USSR whose continued existence is based on the digital technology that barely had a chance to take off before the Soviet collapse. For years now, the hashtag #SovPunk (and its variations, #sovpunk and #sovPunk and #SovietPunk) has popped up intermittently on both the English- and Russian-language Internet (on Twitter and Pinterest as well as a tag on Flickr), often attached to retro-Soviet objects and styles, though it has not coalesced into a significant movement.

The aesthetic appeal of the SovPunk idea is clear, as are the parallels to steampunk’s fetishization of analog technology. The comparison has its limits, however. In steampunk, the reappropriation of the nineteenth century is largely a matter of aesthetics and adventure; to the extent that there is nostalgia, it is at a great remove from the implied reader’s experience or ideological framework. Coined by analogy to the much more politically charged genre of cyberpunk, the inherently backward-looking steampunk lacks its parent genre’s critique of capitalism and speculation about the nature of the posthuman. In steampunk, the coolness is the message.

This is one of the weaknesses of the “SovPunk” coinage. While the imaginary Soviet present (and, occasionally, Soviet future) certainly look to the past for inspiration, the guiding principle is not primarily aesthetic. The USSR in the twenty-first century can serve a variety of ideological and artistic purposes: it can compensate for the lingering sense of defeat and loss stemming from the Soviet collapse; it can serve as a utopian or dystopian alternative to the current order of things; and, perhaps most important, it can estrange the reader and viewer from the actual world around them, making our world seem somehow off thanks to the sheer ordinariness of the constructed alternative Soviet present.

The present-day Soviet Union is not all that common in Russian fiction; Elena Chizhova’s 2017 novel The China Expert (Kitaist) comes close, and even this book derives much of its power from its position within the “Hitler wins” category of alternate history. In the novel, the prewar territory of the USSR is divided between an independent, communist Soviet Union and a Nazi-dominated Russia. Moreover, The China Expert seems to take place in the 1980s, which leaves the USSR’s continued survival an open question. Rather, the present-day Soviet Union featured prominently in two of the most popular television series of the last decade: The Dark Side of the Moon (Obratnaia storona luny, 2012–2018), a Russian remake of the British TV series Life on Mars (2006–2007), and Chernobyl: The Exclusion Zone (Chernobyl’: Zona otchuzhdeniia; 2014–2017; feature film, 2019). The uses of the alternative present-day USSR are the focus of chapter 4.

Fantasies about a Soviet Union that never collapsed are an extended exercise in the conditional subjunctive, what the world would be (or would have been) like in this scenario. As fantasies, they can be immersive—no one in the story is aware that they are a different or imaginary world—or they can be portal/quest fantasies, like The Dark Side of the Moon and Chernobyl: The Exclusion Zone, in which one or more characters from our reality travel to an alternate present-day USSR, and these characters’ alienation from their new surroundings is part of the story. Either framework can serve as an exercise in wish fulfillment, even when the new Soviet “reality” proves less than enticing.

But science fiction and fantasy are not the only paths to a Soviet present, or even to visiting a Soviet past. The Soviet conditional subjunctive can also be the result of a collective act of will on the part of people who know that they are deviating from post-Soviet reality or rejecting it all together. Chapters 3 and 4 look at a wide range of attempts, both in fiction and in real life, to revive or maintain the fallen Soviet Union in the present day. The most obvious form is the theme park, as in the 2006 film Park of the Soviet Period (Park sovetskogo perioda) and the brief public event at Gorky Park under the same name. More evocative and controversial is Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s years-long film series, exhibits, and experiment in communal living called DAU, which immersed all of its participants (and, eventually, visitors) in the reconstruction of a lost Soviet world. Dogged by accusations of cult-like behavior and sexual violence, DAU would be an object lesson in going overboard.

On a less sinister but potentially more politically disruptive note is the movement of people scattered throughout the former Soviet space who insist that the dismantling of the USSR was illegal and invalid, refuse to pay taxes, and use “Soviet” identity documents. They are the apotheosis of the nation as imagined community: they refuse to see the Russian Federation as a real legal entity, insisting on the existence of the Soviet Union as an act of sheer collective will.

When Russia’s president compares viruses to the vaguely remembered barbarian invaders of yore, and when the first post-Soviet decade is continually framed in terms of an early seventeenth-century crisis, should we really be surprised that so many visions of Russia’s future resemble popular conceptions of the Middle Ages? The medieval future is, of course, a familiar trope in the history of science fiction, most notably in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), which features generations of monks trying to recreate civilization after a nuclear holocaust. Though a postapocalyptic setting makes a medieval future seem more plausible, it is not a requirement, as Frank Herbert’s Dune novels (1965–) certainly show. Medieval settings can also be projected onto other, less “advanced” planets, as in the Strugatsky brothers’ Hard to Be a God (1964). The medieval trappings of epic fantasy (and the rise of the Russian genre known as “slavic fentezi”) have certainly kept the Middle Ages alive in speculative literature, as have the numerous medieval-themed video games.

The most common Western medieval futures tend to be not merely postapocalyptic but postnational: the very idea of the preapocalyptic nation is as distant as nuclear fission. (Here the insistent Americanness of A Canticle for Leibowitz is an exception rather than the rule.) While there are plenty of Russian science fiction stories that feature a more generic, supranational future, I would argue that they are fighting against internal ideological trends in the post-Soviet space. The Putin Era’s emphasis on sovereignty above all else, combined with the prominence of crackpot theories of ethnicity and nation inspired by the work of Lev Gumilev, renders a world without national borders dystopian by definition.

Russian medieval futurism, by contrast, is insistently Russian. The futuristic medieval setting is within some iteration of Russian territory. And the medieval future, far from being always dystopian, might not even be that bad. Mikhail Yuriev and Vladimir Sorokin are two authors who look to a particular moment in Russian medieval history, Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina (1565–1572), which they project onto the Russian near future. Yuriev’s Third Empire is fiction, to the extent that it describes events that haven’t happened (yet), but is much more in the tradition of the early works of utopian literature that dispense with plot and character in favor of chronicle and travelogue. If The Third Empire is a blueprint for a Russian imperial revival modeled on a sixteenth-century reign of terror, Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Sugar Kremlin (Sakharnyi Kreml’), and, to a lesser extent, Telluria turn Yuriev’s fantasy into the stuff of nightmare.

The Post-Soviet Uncanny

The subtitle of this book is “On the Post-Soviet Uncanny.” Where, you might ask, does the Uncanny fit in? The vast literature on the subject follows from Freud’s classic 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” which establishes a compelling argument about the nature of the phenomenon, albeit through a less than convincing etymological sleight of hand. Noting that the German term unheimlich (uncanny) contains within it the word heimlich (homey), Freud uses examples from literature and case studies to assert that the uncanny is that which was once familiar, subsequently repressed, and then brought back to create the “uncanny” effect. Never mind that this etymology doesn’t work in most other languages (the English word “uncanny,” for example, has nothing to do with any word for “home”)—if it’s in German, it must be true.

If Freud’s approach is persuasive, however, it is not because of his shaky linguistics. If anything, un/heimlich serves as a useful mnemonic for the dynamic he identifies, rather than as evidence. The tension between the familiar and its frightening, distorted counterpart explains the eeriness associated with statues and dolls (which don’t move … but what if they could?), or animated human representations that try their best to be realistic rather than cartoony (and end up trapped in the “uncanny valley” to which hyperreal animation is prone).

Alternate Soviet Unions, trips to the national past, and representations of a medieval Russian future are also prone to an uncanny effect but not the one that might be expected. A twenty-first-century USSR is both familiar and strange, but the uncanniness lies elsewhere. It is the uncanny effect that immersive fantasy can have on our perceptions of the world in which we live.

When I was around eight years old, one of my older brothers and my future sister-in-law took me and another brother to a marathon showing of all five of the original Planet of the Apes movies. According to IMDB, that comes to a total, back-to-back runtime of eight hours and six minutes; with breaks, it must have amounted to about nine hours. It was morning when the marathon started, and night when we came out. But the biggest shock came when we looked around at all the people on the street: where were all the apes? Seeing nothing but human faces should have been the most ordinary thing in the world, but at that moment, it seemed thoroughly bizarre. The familiar human form became briefly uncanny.

Though simians may be underrepresented in modern Russian entertainment, the result of immersion in post-Soviet alt-Russia fantasies is not that different. These stories start out as side trips into a conditional-subjunctive existence, but their overall effect is to create estrangement from the real post-Soviet existence. The uncanny lies not in the strange familiarity of the fantastic scenario but in the revelation of the uncanny strangeness in the reader’s or viewer’s everyday reality.

1. This difference between American and Soviet/Russian approaches to time was noted by Stephen Hanson in Time and Revolution, a book that has been invaluable as background research for this project. For more on the standardization of time in the modern West, see Vanessa Ogle’s Global Transformation of Time.

2.Martian Time-Slip was the title of a 1964 novel by Philip K. Dick; Robinson (and his colonists) are engaging in an in-joke.

3. See Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s Red Mirror for a particularly convincing analysis of the Time of Troubles metaphor for the 1990s. Also see Adrian Selin’s “Uroki smutnogo vremeni.”

4. See Maxim Hanukai’s “Resurrection by Surrogation” for a thorough and insightful discussion of the Immortal Regiment.

5. The translation of Putin’s remarks in this article renders “Polovtsy” as “Cumans.” This is an acceptable translation, but, given that all the word play involves “Polovtsian,” it is confusing. I have replaced “Cumans” with “Polovtsians” in this particular quote. For more on the memetic afterlife of Putin and Polovtsians, see my Meanwhile, in Russia (99–122).

6. Hence Sergeui Alex. Oushakine’s wonderful article title, “‘We’re Nostalgic, but We’re Not Crazy.’”

7. See Kobrin and Lipovetskii; Kobrin, “Eternally Wonderful Present”; and Lipovetskii and Etkind.

8. On Metro 2033, see Griffiths (494–504); Hoet, Howanitz, and Sokolova.

9. Oleksandr Zabirko discusses the Time Crashers’ cavalier relationship with changing the past in “Magic Spell of Revanchism” (289), as does Ian Garner in “From Stalingrad to the Stars.”