Hello, Stalin!

It’s 1940, and a young Pioneer named Vitya Solnyshkin has been given the rare honor of meeting with Joseph Stalin in the general secretary’s Kremlin office. Vitya quickly explains that he is not what he seems. He is, in fact, Viktor Egorovich Petrov, a sixty-four-year-old retired construction worker whose consciousness abandoned his dying body in 2017 and somehow found itself housed in the form of a little boy three years before Petrov was born.

Curiously, Stalin is not at all surprised. When Vitya warns him of the impending German attack and advises him to execute such future traitors as young Borya Yeltsin and little Misha Gorbachev, Stalin is unmoved (“You really don’t like third-graders, do you, Pioneer Solnyshkin?”) (Lukianenko 394). It’s not that Stalin doesn’t believe him; quite the contrary, he’s heard it all before: “What do you think, that you’re the only one? That you’re unique? No one else has come to the past from the future before?” (Lukianenko 394).

Whether they found a time machine, were mysteriously transported due to a cataclysm or transmigrated like Vitya, time travelers have been giving Stalin advice for years now. And not just Stalin: as far back as Ivan the Terrible, records suggest that emissaries from the future have been paying visits to Russia’s leaders. Stalin assumes his contemporaries Adolf Hitler and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are getting their fair share of self-appointed twenty-first-century advisers, but none of it amounts to anything actionable. Everyone seems to have their own version of the historical timeline, and all their advice is conflicting. Stalin will send Vitya to join other travelers in a special research group in the Urals, but he is not planning on altering his decisions based on their input.

This story (“Vitya Solnyshkin and Joseph Stalin”) is, of course, a parody of countless other tales of its kind: the stories of the Time Crashers, the accidental tourists who find themselves in another time, space, or dimension, usually for no apparent reason. Stalin is a popular figure in this genre, but here he plays an unusual role. Ordinarily, the traveler (most often, from our time) is the primary point of reader identification, but here it is Stalin who is the reader’s stand-in. He’s heard too many of these stories before, and it’s going to take more than an encounter with a prepubescent time-traveling senior citizen to impress him.

“Vitya Solnyshkin and Joseph Stalin” does its best to demystify the genre while still invoking its usual mystical hand waving (Viktor Petrovich ends up in Vitya’s body by unexplained magic). The point is not that such travel is impossible, since the genre has never depended on convincing readers that such stories could happen. Instead, “Vitya Solnyshkin” demonstrates that the trip simply isn’t worth taking. History has happened, and no amount of narcissistic fantasy about the hero’s intervention is going to change anything. Nor is any individual story going to add much to the genre. We’ve seen it all before.

The Time Crashers are easy to parody, and “Vitya Solnyshkin” would be unlikely to stand out from the crowd were it not for its author, Sergey Lukyanenko.¹ One of the few Russian-language genre writers to gain global fame, Sergey Lukyanenko is best known for his Night Watch series of novels and stories, which inspired two films by Timur Bekmambetov: Night Watch (2004), which was an international hit; and Day Watch (2008), which was not. Lukyanenko’s work in English translation consists of few entries besides the Night Watch series, which could lead readers to believe that the author deals exclusively in urban fantasy. But his vast Russian catalog tells a different story. Lukyanenko has tried his hand at virtually every subgenre of Russian fantasy and science fiction (F&SF), except for one: the author is vehement in his disdain for historical Time Crasher stories.

Lukyanenko has no objection to sending characters to other worlds or dimensions by accident or through alien intervention, but he finds the historical tales derivative and unrelentingly conservative, if not quasi-fascist. Yet he cannot ignore them. Time Crasher stories appear to be the fastest growing variety of F&SF in Russia. Even excluding accidental travel to nonhistorical destinations, the genre is too large to keep track of. The twenty-fourth edition of the online Complete Encyclopedia of Popadantsy to the Past (Viazovskii and Garik, Polnaia entsiklopediia, 24th ed.) has 2,100 entries, including 222 works that were not listed in the previous edition posted only five months earlier. No surprise that Stalin is weary of these time-traveling guests! The real shock is that Pioneer Solnyshkin was able to get a private conversation with the general secretary. By rights, his office should have been jam-packed with Time Crashers, nattering on about how to save the Soviet Union from enemies foreign and domestic.

Lukyanenko’s story is not the most likely gateway into the Time Crasher genre; characterized by bemused exhaustion rather than a sense of wonder, “Vitya Solnyshkin” reads more like a farewell. Given the backward-looking nature of the genre, however, “Vitya Solnyshkin” proves quite appropriate. Imagine Time Crasher stories as a brand-new genre, with Lukyanenko dropping in from the future in order to, if not save it, then at least nudge it in the direction of self-awareness.

This leads us to one more thing worth noting about the story: “Vitya Solnyshkin” reflects not just a generic reader’s impatience with the Time Crashers but that of the story’s author. No fan of Stalin, Lukyanenko nonetheless uses the Soviet dictator as a point of authorial identification. Stalin’s presence sums up the critique of the genre Lukyanenko already made elsewhere under his own name (“Popadantsy”). This kind of authorial self-insertion can be found in any genre but is particularly characteristic of fan fiction (fic) (Bacon-Smith 154–56; Jamison). Perhaps inadvertently, Lukyanenko shows how much fan fiction and the Time Crashers have in common. The Time Crashers may be accidental tourists, but their creators are essentially writers of fic. Their fandom is history.

What looks like simple nostalgia proves to be much more complicated; the accidental time traveler’s relationship with both his home time period and the world in which he arrives is one of profound estrangement. Both in the present and in the means by which he travels to the past, he exerts little agency over his own life. Only in the historical fantasyland that greets him does he get to play the hero. If the circumstances of the present are beyond his control, those of the past are not.

After some consideration, I have chosen to use the masculine pronoun to refer to the typical Time Crasher, not only because the character really is almost always male (women show up more often as part of a group that does the traveling) but to highlight the way in which historical estrangement becomes gendered. Some of the more interesting examples of Time Crashers involve the implantation of a present-day man’s mind into the body of a young girl. Others use the hero’s personal timeline to represent the problem of historical origins. Time travel stories often flirt with the grandfather paradox (going back in time and accidentally killing your grandfather so that you are never born), but Time Crashers prefer the other variant, familiar to viewers of Back to the Future: the possibility of either incest (a sexual encounter with the mother in the past) or disturbing age gaps hidden by discrepancies between the hero’s old mind and his young body.

Traveling in time is usually a life-changing event for the traveler, but the fate of the world is not always at stake. This chapter takes a look at the Time Crasher stories in which the hero’s agency is critical: he is to perform a task that will alter or preserve history, either saving or improving himself along the way. Such stories both construct and rely on the near-total identification of personal history with the history of the world or, more often, the nation. This is, of course, flattering to the hero and to the readers/viewers encouraged to identify with him, but it also encourages an affective attachment to the country’s history that is easily assimilated by nationalist or imperialist agendas. The plots are about the restoration or affirmation of a “natural” historical order with Russia at the center, an order that, while under threat, can still be saved through the dedication and possible self-sacrifice of the patriotic Time Crasher. Unsurprisingly, World War II (to which Vitya Solnyshkin found himself drawn in Lukyanenko’s parody) is a frequent, but not exclusive, setting. The next chapter examines the lower-stakes stories in which the drama is almost entirely personal.

But first, we need to take a look at the origins of the genre itself.

In Search of Lost Time Travelers

As James Gleick demonstrates in Time Travel, fictional characters have been traveling to the future and the past for centuries, but time travel as a distinct notion is surprisingly new (28–43). It was H. G. Wells who shifted the concept from pure fantasy into the realm of “scientific romance” when he published The Time Machine in 1895. The fact that the book’s title now seems so generic underscores just how influential Wells’s work was—apparently, no one before him had ever thought to put “time” and “machine” together.

The result was not only the eventual proliferation of time travel stories but a particular framework rooted in science and logic: time travel can create paradoxes, and therefore becomes an irresistible logical puzzle. Ask the average person what trappings they associate with science fiction, and they will probably mention robots, spaceships, and time machines. Within the science fictional framework, time travel stories are an ideal testing ground for theories about determinism and free will, the importance of individual people or events, and even the makeup of the cosmos. And, of course, time travel provides endless possibility for adventure.

With the exception of adventure, most of these concerns are irrelevant to the Time Crasher phenomenon. Not only do these stories rarely bother with mechanical or pseudoscientific contrivances, but they also tend not to care at all about the method of travel. As for the possibility of paradox, their concern is selective and sporadic at best. They lack a fundamental feature of science fictional time travel stories: an implicit or explicit theory of time. Despite the enduring centrality of Wells to the Russian understanding of fantastika, most Time Crasher stories are composed as if decades of science fictional time travel tales had never been written. We should recall that the Russian equivalent of “science fiction” is nauchnaia fantastika—“scientific fantasy.” The Time Crasher genre jettisons the scientific in favor of the fantasy, instead following in the tradition of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The titular Yankee ends up in Arthurian England after a blow to the head knocks him unconscious. When he wakes up, he is in a different time. How does this work? The correct answer is crucial to appreciating the story: it doesn’t matter.

Readers of Time Crasher stories have no particular reason to believe that a head injury, a mysterious fog, or lying on one’s deathbed are feasible means of time travel. Rather, readers make different demands of the text. In this, Time Crasher stories differ from other hard-core F&SF genre entertainments, whose devoted fans often derive satisfaction from expanding and interrogating a particular text’s or franchise’s lore. This holds true for fantasy as well as for science fiction, as even a cursory familiarity with Harry Potter fandom demonstrates. These fans find as much pleasure in the mechanics of the imaginary tale as they do in the tale itself. All Time Crasher readers require is for the players to get where they are supposed to be.

Generally, in both fantasy and science fiction time travel is expected to be replicable, but Time Crashers primarily travel by means that are idiosyncratic and personal. A pre-teen science fiction reader might dream of building a time machine, but they are unlikely to induce a head injury in order to kill baby Hitler. This underscores the frequent status of the hero as an authorial stand-in: it is the author’s sensibility (and ideological agenda) that propels the trip to another time.

The ubiquity of the hero as author’s mouthpiece helps explain why so many Time Crashers travel in mind but not body. The hero’s knowledge from the future and of the past’s future are what matters. When bodies do travel backward in time, they are often accompanied by useful artifacts, particularly laptop computers, the material embodiment of information from the future. Mikhail Koroliuk’s Save the USSR! (Spasti SSSR!) splits the difference by having the adult hero’s mind end up in the body of his fourteen-year-old self, which has magically gained the power of “brain surfing,” allowing him to call up information as if he had the entire Internet downloaded into his adolescent head.

On a superficial level, psychic time travel avoids some of the more obvious potentials for paradox. When Marty McFly meets his future parents in the 1950s in Back to the Future, that means that, as teenagers, they always knew someone who would happen to look like the teenage son they would have decades later. But the implantation of the adult mind into the child’s or adolescent’s body turns out to be fraught with perils not unlike Marty’s near-incestuous encounter with his future mother.

Trying to fix world or national history by hijacking one’s own personal history is the assertion of a particular type of cosmos, in which the micro is a synecdoche for the macro. The personal is not just political; it is integral to the fate of the nation. This is narcissism on a cosmic scale, beyond even the “great man” theory of history. The hero/authorial stand-in (often an office or IT worker, both of which are common day jobs for F&SF writers) just happens to be the person who can save everything. Office drones to the rescue!

Psychic time travel lays bare the device of post-Soviet nostalgia and historical fandom. Watching or reading stories of the Soviet past can be a form of escapism, sending the audience back to an idealized time. The psychic Time Crasher moves the audience out of the role of passive spectator and into something more like a gamer in a first-person shooter. These stories emplot the phenomenon Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia,” which “reconstruct[s] emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and specialize time” (49). In terms of fandom, these stories combine the “curatorial” ethos (guarding the canon against heresy) and the “transformational” impulse (in fixing history, the Time Crashers are improving on a beloved storyworld) (obsession_inc 2009).

By necessity, psychic travel along one’s personal timeline reduces the scope of time travel to the length of the hero’s life span. Pensioners go back to World War II, while members of the last Soviet generations end up somewhere in the Brezhnev era. In each case, the connection between the personal and historical is far stronger than any jaunt to the age of Ivan the Terrible might be. The Soviet Union, we should recall, lasted for just under seventy-four years (if we count from the October Revolution), which was only a few years longer than the average Soviet male life span in 1991 (68.47 years). The USSR’s life cycle is easily comprehensible in human terms, all the more so for people whose lives began in the Soviet Union. In trying to correct the moments where their country went wrong, these Time Crashers are rebooting their own lives.

Portrait of a Grandpa as a Young Girl

In the introduction, I noted that the genre’s inherent dissatisfaction with the present creates an uncanny effect: something about the present simply does not feel right. Even more, in the Time Crasher stories the present day is uncanny: the hero has a continual sense of not quite fitting into his own time and place. In its combination of familiarity and wrongness, the uncanny becomes internalized: what could be more unheimlich than the suspicion that the problem resides in one’s very sense of self? One particularly unusual set of Time Crasher narratives intensifies the sense of the uncanny by attaching it to the hero’s body as gender dysphoria. In the novel that gives the collection Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete its title, the male author’s stand-in is reborn in the past as a girl (Arsen’ev, Studentka).²

Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete is narrated by an old man who, sometime in the 2040s, has reached the end of a life marked by disappointments and tragedy. His son died defending his motherland (now renamed the “Democratic Republic of Muscovy,” abbreviated as “SHIT” in Russian), his daughter died in a nuclear blast in the “Baltic Republic,” and his young granddaughter was tortured and murdered. He drops dead of a heart attack and wakes up in the body of an infant girl named Natasha on December 31, 1960. He has all of his memories and mental capacities as an adult man, which allow him to become a child prodigy. Continuing to use the masculine pronoun and verb forms in his first-person narration, Natasha excels in organizational work at his elementary school, joins the Pioneers at an early age, has a brief, successful film career while still a teenager, and then becomes an athlete who eventually specializes in marksmanship.³ This is all part of his master plan, which succeeds when, in 1980, Natasha is presented to the leadership of the Soviet Union at the opening of the Moscow Olympics, whereupon he shoots and kills Andropov, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, saving the Soviet Union from collapse. He dies happy, knowing that he has created a new timeline, one whose further history is explored (and again rewritten) in the other two stories collected in the volume.

The author, Sergei Vladimirovich Arsenyev, appears to be an elderly man who got his start writing online. Most of his work is hosted by Samizdat (samlib.ru), a self-publishing portal ironically reappropriating the Soviet term used for writing disseminated unofficially. Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete was posted in November 2011, then picked up by EKSMO—one of Russia’s largest publishers—for commercial publication the following year. (It seems to be the only one of his works to make this sort of crossover.) In addition to other Time Crasher stories, Arsenyev has written in numerous other F&SF subgenres, as well as in historical realism.

Imputing psychological motivations to an author is always a tricky business, all the more so when information is so sparse. But Arsenyev’s Samizdat page contains a brief manifesto titled “Sergei Arsenyev on His Work” (“Sergei Arsen’ev o svoem tvorchestve,” 2010). It consists of ten points, including condemnations of capitalism and democracy, praise for Stalin and denial that the Terror happened, calls for qualified tolerance of national minorities (“as long as the migrant behaves like a person, and not like an ape that’s escaped from the circus”), belief that the collapse of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes in history, disdain for the “opportunists” in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and a declaration that Hitler was “not an idiot” but rather a leader who did a great deal for his country in the 1930s (even if by 1945 he had degenerated into “a total shit”). This is fairly standard stuff for both contemporary Russian science fiction and fan fiction, but there is one more point that stands out: “6. I hate homos” (Nenavizhu gomosekov). This, too, is hardly unusual, but its placement in the middle of the manifesto, as the shortest and therefore presumably least complicated proposition is intriguing. Especially when one considers that his favorite trope is the transmigration of an old man’s mind into a little girl’s body.

While I may not be comfortable psychoanalyzing Arsenyev from a distance, commenters online have no qualms about offering an armchair diagnosis. A self-identified gay man writing under the username Skepsis on March 5, 2021, asks how it is possible to “seriously” espouse an ideology combining homophobia, tolerance of ethnic minorities, and an admiration for Hitler:

It’s extremely sad, Arsenyev, that you are a man-hater who is disgusted with his own body. Because only such clinical abnormalities can explain the SIMULTANEOUS presence of the red thread running throughout your entire work—the transfer of an adult man’s consciousness into the body of a little girl while maintaining a sexual orientation toward girls that is normal for a man but not normal for a girl. Moreover, you manage to describe this along with straightforward disgust for intimacy with a man and a declaration of your hatred of homosexuals. But, alas, I must remind you that female homosexuality, which is clearly found in your novels, is ALSO homosexuality and eroticism, characteristic of “homos.” (Skepsis)

Skepsis’s take on Arsenyev isn’t quite a model of progressive critique. His attack on the author’s homophobia is predicated on a notion of the “normal,” and his characterization of the book’s same-sex eroticism manages to combine trans erasure with outright transphobia. But the tension he finds between Arsenyev’s homophobia and his predilection for magical trans narratives is undeniable. The temptation to attribute stealth trans longing to the author’s own psychological makeup is all the stronger given the near-perfection of the hypercompetent heroines who had once been old men of the author’s generation.

We cannot know for sure if Arsenyev’s own personal gender dysphoria is finding its way into his texts like some repressed Freudian symptom, with the author’s militant homophobia serving as cover for his own trans desire. What we can do, however, is ask what role the text’s explicit gender dysphoria might play in this particular strain of Time Crasher narrative. Just as Solovyov’s Oedipal crisis points to the regressive character of Time Crasher nostalgia in Dark Side of the Moon (see chapter 2), the gender dysphoria in Arsenyev’s work highlights the sociopolitical estrangement of the post-Soviet subject and the uncanny ontology of this subject in both the present day and the imagined past.

I Enjoy Being a Girl

In the prologue, the man who will be Natasha is taking stock of his life in the moments before the heart attack that kills him, and the picture is not pretty. In the decades since the Soviet collapse, the world has become a hostile, alien environment even as his body has begun to betray him. The first page is a litany of complaints that are the familiar lot of the elderly: his body can no longer handle the cold, nor can he walk without a cane. But not all of his dissatisfaction is the inevitable result of old age. He has to rely on humanitarian aid (expired dog food and stale bread), because after he pays his rent and utilities, his pension is almost exhausted. It is when he mentions money that we begin to see the strangeness of his world, as all the prices are calculated in euros rather than rubles.

He has the classically masculine instincts of a protector, sheltering a seventy-year-old widowed neighbor who has been evicted from her apartment, though she dies in her sleep just three months later. But overall, he has been a failure as a protector and provider, albeit through no fault of his own. Both his children are dead, and his young granddaughter has been murdered. When he dies, he leaves behind a world that could not let him succeed as a man.

The protagonist’s gender swap allows him to redeem both himself and his country, rewriting the literal past of the Soviet Union while symbolically reversing the biggest tragedies of his own life. On one hand, everything bad that happened to him in the original timeline can be attributed at least indirectly to the collapse of the USSR; on the other hand, his losses are also experienced as the personal failures of a father, husband, and grandfather. The USSR fell apart due to incompetent or treacherous leadership, leading to destruction of the narrator’s family as a failure of his husbandry. Reborn as Natasha, he becomes both a hypercompetent caretaker (no one will die on his watch now, with one key exception) and the world’s least likely but most successful political assassin. In so doing, he exchanges helplessness for agency.

Young Natasha immediately distinguishes himself on the domestic front. Natasha’s mother dies suddenly, not long after giving birth to twin boys, on her daughter’s eighth birthday, leaving behind a husband who is incapable of running their home. (He goes out on a drinking spree for three days before Natasha whips him back into shape.) With the help of a girlfriend his age, Natasha takes over the cooking and the cleaning, along with the care of his infant brothers. He is, of course, exhausted, but he does not let his new burdens impede his efforts to build a new book collection for his school and assume a leadership position among his peers.

As he grows older, Natasha moves from triumph to triumph, even starring in a movie that was one of his (original) childhood favorites. His never-ending success, along with the constant praise he receives from all those who surround him, are the hallmarks of authorial self-insertion in fan fiction. Yet the story’s wish-fulfillment fantasy is always complicated by Natasha’s own complicated gender identity. In his mind and in his narration, Natasha remains stubbornly male, using masculine pronouns and maintaining a sense of continuity with his previous life as a man. In his daily interactions, however, he functions as female, using feminine pronouns and grammatical forms. If Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete is the author’s fantasy of trans rebirth, it is certainly idiosyncratic. Taking the narrator’s words at face value, the novel creates rather than solves gender dysphoria. According to the logic of the novel itself, Student is not the story of a trans woman reborn as a cisgender girl, but of a cisgender man reborn as a transgender boy who never comes out to those around him.

If we follow the argument of the hostile samizdat.ru commentator discussed earlier, we have before us a Freudian return of the repressed. Rather than confront what Skepsis assumes is the assigned-male writer’s forbidden fantasy of being a girl, Arsenyev addresses his dysphoria by reversing it: his hero must live life as a girl while knowing he is a man. But if we refrain from imputing motive and desire to Arsenyev himself, we are left with an even more intriguing statement about the Time Crasher fantasy. In such a reading, gender dysphoria is the Time Crasher’s price of entry, the burden he must bear if he is to travel to the past and rewrite history for the better.

Once Natasha has arrived in 1960, gender dysphoria is the only true conflict in the novel. Otherwise, nearly everything goes according to plan. The real flaw the book struggles with is the idealization not of the protagonist but of the setting. Brezhnev-era Russia is overwhelmingly wonderful, a utopian alternative to the dystopian 2040s. By having Natasha live in the “wrong” body, Arsenyev unites both time periods in a shared discomfort, amplifying the uncanny effect of a familiar malaise throughout the novel. Contrary to the reading that imputes trans desire to the author, the saving grace of Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete is its refusal to be a perfect fulfillment of a fantasy. Natasha can be a girl saving his beloved homeland from its degradation into a neoliberal hellscape, or he can reside in said hellscape as a man. Natasha cannot “have it all.”

As a child, Natasha resists his mother’s efforts to get him to wear bows, eventually managing to have his hair cut short. He checks himself for signs of sexual interest in boys but finds none. This does not mean he has resolved never to have sex. If sleeping with a man will get him closer to his goal, then he’ll do it. Instead, he is interested in girls, even kissing a German girl in public: “When it comes right down to it, why do Brezhnev and Honneker get to do it, but not Elsa and me, huh?” (213).

Still, the book suggests that gender dysphoria is a small price for Natasha to pay in exchange for a better world. When he was an old man in the 2040s, Natasha’s focus was on his family and friends and all the misery they endured; the sociopolitical situation that caused their troubles was always in the background but far beyond his ability to affect. In his own time, “everyone understood that they had lost. Fighting on was impossible. No one believed in victory” (147). The 1970s were another matter: “People believe in the future. In the future of themselves and their children” (147).

In the hands of a more subtle writer, we might identify productive irony and ambiguity in a declaration about “belief in the future” made by a time traveler to the past. Natasha, who has seen the terrible future, is the last person who should have any optimism. As an eleven-year-old girl in 1972, he can soberly assess the world he came from and the world in which he now lives: “Now this country is perhaps at the peak of its might. And no one can see that we are heading toward the abyss, and in literally a decade and a half it will all end in a grandiose Catastrophe” (145).

On their own, the optimists of the 1970s cannot create the future in which they believe. It will take the machinations of a visitor from a terrible future to make the bright future that ordinary people expect.⁴ He will never be able to live in the world that he creates, but that does not matter. In the scheme of things, his first death meant nothing, just as the deaths of all his loved ones were pointless. Now he can choose to make a sacrifice. In an inversion of the Stalinist slogan, Natasha dies and is reborn to bring a fairy tale to life.

To Natasha, saving the USSR from collapse means preventing the deaths of his loved ones in the future (never mind the time paradoxes involved). His impending Christ-like sacrifice is preceded by a brief digression into a Gethsemane of doubt:

I could just stop, to hell with the Plan. Live the life of a normal Soviet person. Or go into business. Or even government. I could try to get into Yeltsin’s inner circle (even if it means sleeping my way there) and get towed along into the Kremlin… . And watch my Motherland die… . No! I’m not going to stop. Ninochka! I remember you and I’ll save you! (223)

Right before the assassination, he reminds himself of his purpose: “For my Vovka, killed by NATO. For my old, sick neighbor Sergei Kuz’mich, mugged at the drugstore. For my only granddaughter Nina, raped and tortured to death. For the impoverished, half-starved existence of old people who worked all their lives” (235).

The whole point of Natasha’s second life is to right wrongs. Post-Soviet Russia was never really his home, because it was the corrupt wreckage of a once great country. Natasha’s rebirth as a girl works because it helps prevent him from ever being truly comfortable in the world that he needs to save, thereby helping him resist the temptation to remain behind. For him, the 1970s will always meet both of Freud’s etymological definitions of the uncanny: it is familiar (homely), but he can never forget its strangeness as the world in which he finds himself. Granted, his discomfort manifests itself rather rarely once Natasha is no longer an infant, perhaps supporting the reading of the book as the author’s forbidden transgender fantasy. Either way, the resulting world that lives on after Natasha’s (second) death is a restoration of a lost era, a projection of a vibrant Soviet Union into the post-1991 future. What was broken is now whole, and this new integrity is reinforced by a minor plot point from the middle of the book. Teenage Natasha encounters his original mother as she is taking her baby out for a stroll: “The baby in her carriage was named … Natasha! Now that was something I never expected… . It’s me. But in this world I was born a girl! So it’s either the “butterfly effect,” or HE has a truly outstanding sense of humor” (143).

We are on unusual Oedipal ground, with just a hint of the time paradox of Robert Heinlein’s classic short story, “All You Zombies,” in which every character turns out to be a version of the narrator from a different moment in time, including the protagonist’s mother and father. No matter who his parents are, Natasha will now always be Natasha. Natasha-the-narrator and Natasha-the-baby might best be seen as two different transgender fantasies. The narrator, by retaining his memories of himself as a man, is either newly dysphoric (because he was fine in a male body before) or a fulfillment of a fantasy of existing in an assigned-female boy while maintaining continuity of consciousness with his previous self. In the second scenario, Natasha-the-narrator remains a trans character in a new body. Natasha-the-baby, who will never have had the life experiences of Natasha-the-narrator, has the chance to grow up as a cisgender girl. Just as the citizens of the twenty-first-century Soviet Union will have no memory of the Soviet collapse, the new Natasha will have no memory of having lived in the world as an adult man. The promised land not only undoes all rupture and dysphoria but hides the traces that they ever existed. If Arsenyev really is working through his own gender troubles in his fiction without acknowledging them, then he has landed on the perfect fantasy—a Soviet Union that lives up to ideals and a rebirth as a girl that amounts to a kind of trans erasure.

This erasure carries over to the short stories that serve as sequels to the novel proper. Each is narrated by a girl with a distant connection to Natasha but with virtually no tonal or stylistic distinction from the narration of Natasha herself. They benefit from Natasha’s sacrifice, born in the world Natasha created, experiencing lives free of both the general malaise of the previous, post-Soviet iteration of reality and the gender dysphoria that haunts the novel. They are just like Natasha, except that they are girls living with no contradiction to the gender assigned to them at birth. One of them even manages to repeat Natasha’s heroic rewriting of history. Accidentally finding herself in Nazi Germany in 1941, she befriends Hitler, prevents World War II and the Holocaust, becomes the first cosmonaut (even appropriating Yuri Gagarin’s famous catchphrase), founds a new world order based on a Nazi/Soviet alliance, and takes over for Hitler as the Führer of the Third Reich.⁵ Arsenyev’s fictional world is now several steps removed not just from our reality but from the dystopian future imagined in the collection’s first pages. Through the efforts of multiple Time Crashers, Arsenyev has erased all trace of both the original sin of our reality (the collapse of the USSR) and the complicated gender issues that the initial novel could not ignore. It is the perfect utopian move, erasing all traces of the unpleasant history that led up to it in order to create a perfect, self-contained world whose past, present, and future all form an idealized closed loop immune to the profane misery of actual history.

War and Remembrance

When Arsenyev sends another young girl named Natasha back to 1941, it is decidedly not to fight in World War II. Certainly, her age and gender make her an unlikely combatant, but that is presumably not the only reason she isn’t sent to the front lines. Her purpose is to prevent war rather than wage it, and her journey depends on the efficiency of the “great man” school of history: all she need do is influence one key figure (in this case, Hitler), and Natasha’s mission is accomplished.

Natasha is far from the only hero(ine) whose travels through time bring her face-to-face with one of the key figures of World War II, as Lukyanenko’s Stalin informs the young Pioneer in the story with which the present chapter opened. But such meetings are not the most common feature of a 1940s setting. On the whole, Time Crashers who end up in World War II are there to wage war rather than prevent it, whether as infantry on the front, as drivers of time-traveling tanks, or as fighter pilots defending the motherland. World War II is the site of action.

Given the human toll suffered by the Soviet Union, along with the justifiable pride in the defeat of the Nazi invaders, this should come as no surprise. It is also consistent with one of the functions of World War II in Soviet postwar mass culture: the Great Patriotic War was one of the few settings that justified the representation of action, violence, and bloodshed. As such, it was a rare outlet for narrative heroic fantasy, while also reinforcing the general militarization of adventure tales in Soviet times. In the absence of superhero or vigilante stories and the scarcity of espionage films and novels, the military played an outsize role in male-oriented entertainment. Moreover, service in the armed forces was technically mandatory for all adult Soviet men (even if many of the privileged found ways around it), which meant that the military formed the basis of a kind of masculine lingua franca. Since the Soviet collapse, adventure stories, like other entertainments, have significantly diversified, but the role of the military remains pronounced.

So when men are sent back to the Great Patriotic War, they fight. And, for the most part, they fight well, which in itself is an important point. Dropping men from present-day Russia onto the battlefields of World War II could yield a variety of results, but it is worth thinking about what these stories are not doing. It would be no stretch to imagine a masculinist morality tale about out-of-shape, effete office drones rediscovering their manhood while saving the motherland. The perennial anxieties about Soviet or Russian masculinity could easily express themselves through such a story, whether they be the Brezhnev-era “crisis of manhood” analyzed by Mark Dumancic in Men out of Focus or the 1990s compensatory masculinity I discuss in Overkill. By the twenty-first century, the discursive work of propping up Russian masculinity has been done. When contemporary Russian men end up in World War II, they are quite capable of fighting. Instead, they have other lessons to learn.

In addition to the hundreds of novels about time travel to World War II, there are also two series of films for the big and small screen: We Are from the Future (2008) and its sequel, We Are from the Future 2 (2010); and The Fog (2010) and The Fog 2 (2012). The first We Are from the Future had a theatrical release before its expanded version appeared on television, while The Fog is effectively two four-episode seasons of a single television drama. Each tells the tale of a group of young men who inexplicably find themselves thrown back in time to World War II, and each delivers a patriotic message that is as far from subtlety as their protagonists are from home.

In the crowded field of World War II time travel narratives, these two stand out by virtue of the size of their audience. Popular as Time Crasher novels are, they are still a small niche in comparison to television and film viewership. Over a million people saw the first We Are from the Future in theaters. Obviously, film and television are more expensive propositions than prose fiction, so the filmmakers would take care to ensure their work has mass appeal. Sending attractive young men to fight and die in the past makes a lot more box office sense that filming the adventures of a septuagenarian man in the body of a schoolgirl.

Mental time travel is not enough for these films; their heroes must be corporeally transported back to the 1940s. It is their bodies that must endure the very real physical dangers they encounter; indeed, in some cases, those bodies even die (if only temporarily). But just as the films are a vehicle for patriotic propaganda, their bodies are vehicles for the stories’ true subjects, their inner selves. Though it is not merely their consciousness that travels to the past, it is their consciousness that must undergo the greatest transformation. By the end of the story, it will have been raised.

The age and experience of the young men would suggest that their time in World War II is a rite of passage from youth into maturity. In fact, the films enact two parallel life-cycle rituals: one for the men, the other for the country itself. The Fog starts its present-day story line in the run-up to Victory Day (May 9), the official commemoration of the defeat of Nazi Germany. This holiday had long been the cornerstone of Soviet mythology. Pride in this victory was justifiable and understandable; more important, it was framed as universal. Talk of the repression of entire nationalities during the war as suspected potential enemy collaborators was discouraged until perestroika, and the extent of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers in the western parts of the USSR was downplayed. Everyone alive owed the Soviet military a great debt, including citizens of the rest of the world, who had the USSR to thank for crushing Hitler’s forces. War memorials were treated as objects of reverence, and proud, medal-bedecked veterans marching in the annual parades were accorded respect.

The annual ritual of remembrance took on new poignancy after 1991. The country that defeated the Nazis was no more, and the public condemnation of Stalin’s crimes was an uncomfortable fit with the long-held idea that Stalin’s military brilliance and the country’s huge economic growth in the 1930s were responsible for the victory. Meanwhile, the veterans were obviously getting older and, more to the point, fewer. The huge celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet victory in 1995 made sense because of the significance of the date but was also a kind of last hurrah: one could not help but be aware that the men and women marching in the fiftieth anniversary parade were unlikely to make it to the sixtieth.

This helps explain the Immortal Regiment procession discussed in the introduction. The absence of the veterans themselves is at least partly compensated by the photos of the dead, whose status in the processions resembles that Russian Orthodox icon. The phenomenon grew quickly after its 2011 introduction, to the point where it has now been thoroughly coopted by the state as a manifestation of official patriotism. But the practice associated with the Immortal Regiment was not new; similar events took place as far back as 1968, recurring at different times and places over the next few decades with a randomness that suggests multiple people coming up with the same idea independently. With the passage of time, the practice is the logical next step after parades of living veterans cease to be a viable option.

Replacing the combatants with their photos changes the entire notion of participation in the celebration of Victory Day. Victory becomes not just a legacy but an inheritance experienced both individually and collectively. In the absence of actual participants, their descendants must take up the mantle of the fallen warriors. With the Immortal Regiment, Victory Day becomes a ritual like the Passover Seder: Jews are taught to talk of the time when “we” were slaves in Egypt, not “our ancestors.” Historical time and present time collapse through the willful engagement of empathy.

Millennials vs. Nazis

Or at least they should. Both The Fog and We Are from the Future are premised on the breakdown of this transhistorical empathy, due to the current young generation’s lack of historical consciousness. The protagonists of The Fog and its sequel are a small group of Russian soldiers who are by no means bad people. To the contrary, they are almost relentlessly ordinary. True, one of them seems to be a born leader, while another, nicknamed Yandex after the popular Russian search engine, is the resident brainiac whose endless font of knowledge will be invaluable to them when they find themselves on the front lines.

Their story unfolds according to the logic of allegory, with their movements in space and time doubling as a representation of their moral development. Before they travel in time, they take part in a training exercise requiring them to hike across a vast terrain. Instead, they choose a short cut, and when they are lost and in danger of missing their deadline, they actually seize a bus full of World War II veterans who are on their way to a commemoration. In their desire to cut corners, they disgrace not only themselves but the men who came before them (now, briefly, their prisoners). The punishment imposed on them by their commander pales in comparison to the punishment inflicted on them by karma: when they march through a thick fog, they end up in World War II.

Once they arrive, the story plods ahead with an uninspired predictability that nevertheless reinforces the overall sense of historical inevitability. After an initial period of confusion, the young men throw in with the Red Army and fight the German invaders. Their twenty-first-century cynicism is replaced by a 1940s’ Sense of Purpose. Though they have no idea if they can ever make it back to their home time, they realize that part of their mission has to be to make sure that the futuristic weaponry they have brought with them does not remain in Nazi hands, or else they will have inadvertently changed the course of the war. In the last episode of the first season, several of them die heroically, only to be miraculously resurrected when the whole group has returned back to its proper time. They have arrived at precisely the right moment to watch the victory parade, with special attention to the proud veterans whom they had so deeply offended in the first episode. The camera pans across the faces of our heroes as they try in vain to restrain the tears that well up in their eyes.⁶

We Are from the Future teaches similar lessons but from a different point of departure.⁷ The film’s four protagonists have much further to go in order to redeem themselves. Rather than soldiers, they are unscrupulous treasure hunters who comb World War II battle sites in search of medals and memorabilia.⁸ They are led by Sergei Filatov, a former St. Petersburg University history student whose nickname (Borman) refers to a top official in Hitler’s Reich, and among their ranks is a neo-Nazi skinhead called Skull (Cherep) who has a swastika tattoo on his shoulder. Where the heroes of The Fog are merely jaded and disrespectful, the men in We Are from the Future start out as repulsively cynical.

At a dig outside of St. Petersburg, they are approached by an old woman who lost her son at this site during the war. She begs them to find his silver cigar case. They humor her and promise to give it back to her if they come across it, even though they have no intention of doing so. Inside a dugout, they stumble across a set of military IDs with their names and photos on them, an uncanny shock that convinces them they must be on drugs. Naturally, they run to skinny dip in a nearby lake in order to sober up, but once they are in the water, they find themselves back in 1942.

Naked but still in possession of the mysterious ID papers they found in the dugout, the men are presumed shell-shocked and incorporated into a local Soviet military unit. Slowly they become part of the team, though taking part in actual warfare is still a shock. Along the way, they meet an orderly named Nina with whom Borman falls in love. They even stumble upon Sokolov, the old lady’s lost son and possessor of the mysterious silver cigar case. A dying Sokolov asks them to take his cigar case and bring it to his mother. By the end, our heroes have become thoroughly dedicated to the Soviet cause; Nina is presumed dead; one of the men is mortally wounded; and all four go back to the lake, this time successfully returning to the present. The wounded man is miraculously healed, but that is only an external manifestation of the changes to their hearts. The film ends with Skull trying to scrape the swastika tattoo off his skin.

Their moral transformation is now complete—so complete, in fact, that in the sequel Skull has grown his hair out, and Borman is played by an entirely different actor (the other two members of the original group are absent). All the same, We Are from the Future 2 actually adds to the franchise’s message, unlike the sequel to The Fog, which simply sends the guys back again for another iteration of the premise.⁹ Borman and Skull have completely turned their lives around, becoming real archeologists rather than unscrupulous treasure hunters. Their official work is doubled in the film by their newfound moral purpose: they will teach other cynical young men that the Soviet victory is sacred.

In the first film, our heroes had to overcome their own immaturity and lack of respect, but now they have a more complicated task: combatting the forces of Russophobia and Ukrainian nationalism that would not only complicate the narrative of the war as pure good vs. pure evil but resurrect pro-Nazi sentiment as part of the Ukrainian nation-building project. The film came out in 2010, three years before the Euromaidan protests and four before the outbreak of armed conflict, but five years after the Orange Revolution in Kyiv unleashed growing anti-Ukrainian sentiment in the Russian state media. Borman and Skull are supposed to take part in a reenactment of the 1944 Brody Cauldron battle that was key to the Red Army offensive against the Germans. Appalled at the local Ukrainians’ enthusiasm for Nazi regalia and their hostility toward all things Russian, they try to make the best of things. But they quickly find themselves the object of ridicule on the part of two young Ukrainian men, the nationalist Taras and his friend Seryi (the pampered son of a Ukrainian parliamentarian). As a prank, Taras and Seryi throw an old World War II bomb into the ruins where Borman and Skull are standing, assuming it is a dud. The bomb goes off, sending all four men back to 1944.

We Are from the Future 2 is a dutiful sequel in terms of both plot and theme. Now it is Taras and Seryi who have to learn the lesson that the Russian heroes mastered in the previous film, while Borman and Skull continue the soap opera plot halfheartedly developed during their previous journey. Confronted by the villainous Ukrainians who fought on the side of the Nazis, the twenty-first-century Ukrainians refuse to take part in the fascists’ slaughter of innocent villagers. By the time they are back in the present, they have completely internalized the cult of the Soviet Victory, while also experiencing an object lesson in the virtues of solidarity between Russians and Ukrainians.¹⁰

Meanwhile, the Russians discover that Borman’s beloved Nina is not dead but in her ninth month of pregnancy by her soldier husband. Nina gives birth, but she and her husband heroically die during a bombing, leaving the now-penitent Taras to save their baby. Borman will nonetheless find happiness on his return to the present, when he meets Nina’s granddaughter, who looks exactly like her. It’s a cheap twist but a consistent one: only by dedicating himself to the motherland’s heroic history can he create for himself a happy future, making the present and the future into felicitous iterations of the past.

Were it not for the simplicity of the film’s ideological message and the studio’s commitment to straightforward entertainment, this sequel could have pushed the franchise in a more self-aware, reflective direction. Its iterative function (We Are from the Future 2!), its pointed references to post-Soviet disunity, and in particular the choice of a twenty-first-century setting all point back to a contemporary Russian preoccupation with the reframing of history. In the first film, the protagonists are on a mission to loot the past; their transformation involves the recognition of the primacy of sentimental and historical value over the potential economic rewards of cashing in on World War II artifacts. In the second, we move from archeological dig to historical reenactment, from grave-robbing to voluntarist resurrection.

In a historical reenactment (or “reconstruction,” the Russian term for it), contemporary participants strive for verisimilitude as they simulate a historic battle while obviously aware that they have not traveled in time. The Time Crashers of We Are from the Future 2, having just been transported from a reenactment, are initially unable to recognize the real thing, mistaking it for the deliberate, ludic fraud they have just left. Verisimilitude is not enough; they must experience actual danger to know that they are far from the realm of play. And yet, have they really stopped playing? We see them suffer, we see the danger, but they will, of course, survive. Time Crashing, like historical reenactments, requires a compromise between seriousness and gaming. In each case, the young men involved are using the past to either learn about or remind themselves of the solemnity of the Victory, but even as they are led to identify with the combatants in the Great Patriotic War, they remain aware that there is someplace outside the game (or the war) for them to return to.

The Time Crasher narratives discussed in this chapter are, of course, about history, but history here should be understood as a subset of a larger philosophical concept: the cosmos. By “cosmos” I mean the ancient belief system that presumes homologies between the universe and the individual, that imagines the universe as organized along human principles. The alignments of the stars determine the fates of people on earth, and when all is working well, there is harmony between earth and sky. Both the films about traveling to World War II and Arsenyev’s stories of Natasha and her descendants are tales about the restoration of order and harmony in a time of collapse. In the case of the war films, post-Soviet cynicism and Ukrainian nationalism (presented as anti-Russian by definition) have produced a generation of young men without a moral compass (indeed, they literally go off course before ending up in the past). Joining the fight to save the motherland against the fascists sparks their spiritual rebirth, and they return to the present as better people than they were before they left. Of course, the viewers have no such opportunity, no matter how much World War II-focused entertainment and propaganda are thrown at them, but the heroes’ experience is clearly meant to be inspirational.

Arsenyev’s stories are both more transformational and more pessimistic than the World War II films: they result in the total reconfiguration of history, beginning with preventing the collapse of the USSR and ending with a thousand-year joint Soviet-German Reich. But unlike the films, they do not have a mechanism for returning the Time Crasher to his point of origin, reborn by the experience. To the contrary, the man who would be Natasha has to die for the plot to begin. No doubt this is a function of age, not just of the protagonists (young men in the army vs. a desperate pensioner) but of its producers. The heroes of the films (and their target audience) have their whole lives ahead of them and can use their experience to help build a better world. Arsenyev’s protagonist had no future left before he woke up in the past. Yet, even though it would be impossible for a reader to follow in Natasha’s footsteps, the worldview it offers is largely the same as that of the World War II films: Russians today are fundamentally linked to their country’s history and fate, and it is only by living consciously in accordance with this truth that their lives acquire meaning.

1. Lukyanenko’s story was first published in the collection Lost Watch (Zateriannyi dozor). Though the book contains sixteen different stories, it is Lukyanenko’s name that is put in bold on the cover, along with an announcement of a new Night Watch story (Lukyanenko made two contributions to the collection).

2. The Komsomol is the abbreviation for the Communist Youth League, while the book’s title comes from Leonid Gaidai’s immensely popular film Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (Kavkazskaia plennitsa, 1967). It has become the standard humorous description of a girl who is held up as a model of good behavior.

3. Though he would be unlikely to use such terminology, Natasha’s preferred pronouns are masculine (at least in the privacy of his own thoughts). I am following his example.

4. In “My popali,” Leonid Fishman sees the popodanets as the heir to the Strugatsky Brothers’ progressors: when he ends up in the past, he is a modernizer by default.

5. Within the Time Crasher genre, such a scenario is not all that surprising. Many fascist-leaning “patriotic” Russian writers have imagined a persistent Soviet/Nazi alliance as the best of all possible pasts.

6. As for the second season, they basically do it all over again. Television repeats itself, first as melodrama, then as a naked ratings grab.

7. Not that these films are otherwise all that different from each other. As Ilya Kalinin puts it in “Future-in-the-past,” “they are all basically the same film, and there is no need to talk about each one separately.”

8. In Russian, such people are referred to as chernye kopateli, which literally means “black diggers.” In English, the film is occasionally titled Black Hunters, which would be unlikely to make sense to the uninitiated.

9. In The Fog 2, the men accidentally cause the near-death of Mikhail Yegorov, the soldier who would go on to raise the Soviet flag over the Reichstag. They spend four episodes trying to undo this rather dubious damage; a brief appeal to the Butterfly Effect explains why this change in history is important, but it is worth noting that, at this point, what is at stake seems only symbolic. Given the tenor of World War II commemorations during the 2010s, this seems entirely appropriate.

10. Oleksandr Zabirko argues that the film establishes the Nazis as “the ideological forerunners of the contemporary Ukrainian state” (291).