Tomorrow Never Comes

The end of the Cold War wreaked havoc with cartography, erasing three existing countries from the map (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR) while adding seventeen (and this is not even counting the disintegration of Yugoslavia). This geographical upheaval was accompanied by a redistribution of conceptual territory whose consequences would take years to play out. The former Soviet bloc lost more than nuclear weaponry and economic and political stability. In the division of spoils, the West got custody of the future.¹

Who, after all, was writing the epitaph for the Cold War era? I hesitate to invoke Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, both because of how wrong its predictions now seem and because the “end of history” has become such a post-Cold War cliché, but Fukuyama is an illustrative symptom. Fukuyama was nothing if not timely; his book came out in 1992 (that is, just after the Soviet collapse), and was based on an essay published in The National Interest in 1989 (when Eastern European communist regimes were in a race to see who could self-destruct first). Fukuyama’s triumphalism is difficult to bear, but what should be even more galling to both leftists and the disgruntled denizens of the postsocialist world is his appropriation of a Marxist framework to declare the permanent dominance of the capitalist liberal democratic paradigm. Fukuyama had the vision to realize that the spoils of the Cold War were not merely economic and ideological; the winners retained the right to frame the future.

Granted, a defunct political system would appear to have no future by definition, but for Soviet discourse, the future was about more than simply continuity beyond the present day, or even the central planning five and seven years ahead for which the USSR was so famous. One would expect a Marxist regime to be teleological, but the centrality of the future in Soviet culture goes far beyond the system’s Marxist foundations. The future was more than a goal off in the temporal distance: it was the thing that gave the present its meaning. The Soviet Union, particularly but not exclusively in the Stalin era, drained the present in favor of the future. Any and all suffering and sacrifice endured by the population “now” would be redeemed by what was yet to come.

Replacing the Soviet Union with the Russian Federation and the other fourteen successor states involved not just the passage of calendar time, but the inversion of the temporal hierarchy. The Soviet devaluation of the present in favor of the future suggests another interpretation of Rabfak’s now familiar complaint in “Our Nuthouse Is Voting for Putin”: “Why is today yesterday and not tomorrow?” A better future that is somehow qualitatively different from the present and the past is virtually inconceivable. The post-Soviet era hobbled the national imagination, reducing the future to endless variations on the historically familiar.

With, perhaps, one exception: the end of the world.

After a brief survey of post-Soviet Russia’s post-apocalyptic fantasies, this chapter examines the varieties of Russian futures that could, by some stretch of the imagination, be considered positive: the neomedievalism of Mikhail Yuriev’s Third Empire along with its implicit rejoinder, Vladimir Sorokin’s The Day of the Oprichnik; the online communities creating Soviet futuristic video projects; the nostalgia-infused retrofuturism known in some circles as SovPunk (in video games, Internet memes, and online art exhibits); and the USSR-2061 series of literary and artistic contest challenging amateur creators to come up with their own vision of a twenty-first-century Soviet Union that is in the process of conquering space while solving a whole host of perceived problems at home. Examining all these works together will show what kind of imagined future can reasonably be called “optimistic.”

Only the End of the World Again

The post-Soviet Russian imaginary has had plenty of room for the apocalypse; the end of the world as we know it is always around the corner. There is something dreary about invoking it, on a number of levels. First, there is the prevalence of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic storytelling throughout the entire world at roughly the same time. Second, there are the potentially diminishing returns of destroying civilization on a regular basis. And third, there is the fact that I have personally written on this topic on several occasions. It is telling that the best example I can give of the iterative nature of the apocalypse is one that I have already given in Plots against Russia: Marina and Sergei Dyachenko’s 1999 novel Armaged-dom, which I suggested would be best translated as “Sweet Home Armageddon” (55). In this novel, everyone has come to expect the intermittent apocalypse known as the mryga, which is usually scientifically predicted and announced in advance on television. Many will die, but a few will always survive to face the next mryga to come their way.

When post-Soviet Russia imagines the world’s end, it is partaking in a long-standing cultural tradition of apocalypticism while also engaging in a conversation with popular exemplars from around the world. Perhaps as a result, Russian apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic storytelling is one of the country’s more successful exports; it may not be quite as popular as the family-friendly cartoon sensation Masha and the Bear, but it does have the virtue of a much higher body count. Apocalypticism comes naturally to post-Soviet culture, perhaps because, like the Dyachenkos’ iterative catastrophes in Sweet Home Armageddon, the end of the world is arguably a familiar experience. The Soviet collapse is the obvious example, to be sure, but it is not the only one.

For writers of Russian fiction, the post-Soviet apocalypse is heralded by an event that turned the key elements of Soviet science worship into the stuff of nuclear nightmare: the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl atomic power station. Chernobyl establishes a compelling pattern for late and post-Soviet catastrophe tales. Modernity itself fails ordinary people, destroying institutions, compelling mass evacuation, and threatening public health in mysterious and unpredictable ways. Most important, catastrophe is largely invisible: we see its results (death, societal breakdown), but the event itself is always offstage. World War II may have been the formative trauma for generations of Soviet citizens, but it was a different type of horror: ubiquitous, unrelenting, and impossible not to see. It is the intangibility of Chernobyl that introduced Russia and the Soviet Union to postmodern catastrophe.

Even a cursory look at some of the most notable examples of Russian (post)apocalypticism reveals several important patterns. First, we see the reinforcement of the Chernobyl model in the writers most directly concerned with catastrophe. Second is the reassertion of a cyclical model of history, in which the often-dystopian future is established as a repetition of a familiar past. Third, we find an insistence on the inexplicable, often metaphysical nature of catastrophe, divorced from easily identifiable politics or recent history. Finally, there is a self-referential or metafictional element to catastrophe, either using an apocalyptic scenario to comment on the fate of Russian literature or showing literature’s vulnerability to the collapse of supporting institutions. All of these patterns are in the service of a darkly pessimistic view not just of the future but of the eventual human condition: the inhabitants of the postapocalypse are often barely literate and superstitious, the combination of both nineteenth-century anxieties about degeneration and twentieth-century fantasies of mutation and degradation.

Our main examples will consist of two well-known works: Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx (Kys’), and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s transmedia juggernaut, the Metro 2033 franchise. The Slynx was the long-awaited first novel by an acclaimed highbrow short-story writer, while Metro 2033 spawned a hit video game before launching a multimedia empire. Yet they share a set of presumptions and preoccupations that defy any critical desire to keep them hygienically separate.

The Idiocy of Postapocalyptic Village Life

The Slynx takes place in a town built on the ruins of Moscow, now called Fyodor-Kuzmichsk after its paramount leader. As a result of the Blast (Vzryv), most of the population is plagued by Consequences, mutations presumably caused by radiation. The few survivors of the pre-Blast world (known as the Oldeners [Prezhnie]) are virtually immortal—they can be killed by accident or violence, but otherwise they neither age nor die. The protagonist is Benedikt, who has the prestigious job of transcribing the few old books to survive the destruction of the old world. He would rather have been a more literal keeper of the flame—no one knows how to make a fire, so the person responsible for keeping a fire going is particularly respected. That the two choices are complementary is in itself significant.

The world of The Slynx is a post-apocalyptic variation on the feudal system in general, and the Russian feudal past in particular. The lowest order in Fyodor-Kuzmichsk (a name that is almost as ungainly in Russian as it is in English) are serfs, literally lorded over by the town’s masters. Kudeyar Kudeyarovich Kudeyarov, the Head Saniturion (Glavnyi sanitar’), leads a law-enforcement organization redolent of both Stalin’s terror and Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina. Everyone in town is terrified of the legendary slynx, an animal whose Russian name is a combination of “lynx” and the equivalent of “Here kitty-kitty.” The lynx supposedly stalks the northern woods, but danger lurks much closer to home. Benedikt marries into Kudeyarov’s family and reluctantly helps him stage a coup, realizing too late that the Head Saniturion represents the greatest danger to his world.

Russian critics are divided as to whether or not The Slynx constitutes an “anti-utopia” (a term that, in Russian, is even broader than the much-misused “dystopia” in English), and with good reason. As Natalia Ivanova (“I ptitsu”) and Mark Lipovetsky (“Sled Kysi”) argue, The Slynx is much more concerned with commenting on the Russian intelligentsia and traditional Russian logocentrism than it is in serving as a political cautionary tale. The temporal gap between The Slynx and the novel’s initial readers is the same as that posited by Zamyatin in We, but the functions of these two novels could not be more different (Clowes 37). Even an allegorical reading of The Slynx fails to point to any reasonably probable alarming future. Instead, The Slynx fits more comfortably within the broader genre that spawned both utopia and dystopia: satire.

Yet the impulse to distance The Slynx from dystopia (or anti-utopia) is worthy of examination in and of itself. Reading The Slynx as a dystopia threatens the novel with its own distinct belatedness. Ironically for a book that posits a backward-looking future, The Slynx as dystopia could easily be dismissed as a dissident relic of the Cold War and Soviet times: such classic dystopias as We and 1984 were nourished on the fear of a totalitarian threat, while Russian literature in the Yeltsin years had been taking a much-deserved rest from decades of ideological burdens. If we also recall that Tolstaya’s original inspiration for the novel was the Chernobyl disaster, then The Slynx is not just untimely; the book is quite simply overdue. Nor does appealing to the broader realm of science fiction help Tolstaya’s case. The semiliterate narration was prefigured by Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker (1980), while neither radiation-induced mutation nor an ignorant reverence for the printed page is remotely novel (see Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz). The mutations themselves cannot hold up to the slightest scrutiny, and the Oldeners’ immortality is utterly nonsensical, at least within a science fictional framework.

Such niggling complaints do Tolstaya an injustice, and that is precisely the point. Tolstaya teases her readers with familiar dystopian tropes but refuses to make them add up to anything so simple. Both utopias and dystopias have a long-established epistemological master plot that combines Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with the myth of Prometheus (Morson 88–90). Traveling to utopia is a journey to wisdom, and returning from utopia necessitates the often vain attempt to keep the flame of wisdom alive, bringing it back in the hopes of sharing it with others. Dystopia is also the story of the acquisition of wisdom, but with conspiratorial overtones: it is wisdom that is being deliberately hidden by a regime built on lies (or hoarded, like the stoker’s flames in The Slynx). Within the fictional framework, the wisdom acquired in utopia is usually experiential or discursive; that is, it can be transmitted dynamically, through demonstration or oral speech. Dystopian wisdom tends to require access to static media that are better suited to preservation—in particular, books. This focus on preservation is something dystopias share with post-apocalyptic fiction more broadly (since catastrophe all but obliterates history). Hence the reverence for the printed word, raised almost to the level of fetish: the illuminated manuscripts of A Canticle for Leibowitz; the lost book containing the word “I” in Ayn Rand’s Anthem; the complete works of Shakespeare in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Goldstein’s admittedly falsified counterrevolutionary tract in 1984; and virtually every book ever printed in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Dystopias are an extended plea on behalf of the printed word, while utopias are books to end all books.

The Slynx revisits the book-as-fetish only to interrogate it. Previous dystopias essentially treat old books as taboo: the fact that they are forbidden elevates them to virtually totemic power. Books also leave room for optimism, raising the possibility that postapocalyptic survivors might learn from them and rebuild the best of the past. In other words, postapocalyptic dystopias can recapitulate the power and danger that books usually get only through the apparatus of censorship. In The Slynx, all books are banned, but in both senses of this polysemous word; they are too dangerous to be entrusted to ordinary people in their homes but too precious to be damaged, destroyed, or entirely forgotten (Agamben 28). When the inhabitants of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk fear the presumably radioactive danger of “Oldenprint” books, Tolstaya is subverting the traditional prometheanism that the book embodies for the dystopian tradition: the light these books bring may well be deadly.

Like Zamyatin’s We (My, 1921), The Slynx repeatedly refers to its own status as text, but in a much less direct fashion than D-504’s journal. The book’s chapter titles come from old-fashioned pronunciations of all the letters in the Russian alphabet (including those removed by the Soviet orthography reform of 1917–1918). In form, The Slynx is a bukvar’, a book used to teach children the alphabet and, by extension, literacy. Benedikt himself is repeatedly accused of illiteracy by the Dissident Lev Lvovich, in terms that recall the novel’s form: “You don’t know your ABCs”; “You haven’t learned the alphabet of life. Of life, do you hear me?” Benedikt is appalled: “Do you know how many books I’ve read? How many I’ve copied?” But Lev Lvovich is unrelenting and hurls an accusation that crystallizes the role books have acquired in post-Blast Moscow: “You don’t really know how to read, books are of no use to you. They’re just empty page-turning, a collection of letters” (Tolstaya 227).

Books can be preserved for future generations, but the preservation pays off only if one assumes that they will reach an audience who can understand them. One of the most familiar clichés of Russian book reviews asks whether a book “will find its reader.” Transposed into the terms of The Slynx, that question becomes: Can the book be truly understood as something other than mere words? Will the future reader have the intellect, spirit, and context to do something with it, other than protect or destroy it? These are not abstract questions for Tolstaya, or for her own post-Soviet milieu. The Soviet Union, which prided itself on reading more than any other country, yielded to a Russian Federation that changed the status of reading forever. On one hand, more books were in circulation, but most of them were the sort that intellectuals could not take seriously. On the other, “serious” books were published in ever smaller print runs, with competition from mass-market books (not to mention film, television, the Internet, and gaming), diminishing the chances that such a book could make a difference.

The Slynx reproduces the idolatry of a logocentric, book-worshipping culture; even Pushkin is reduced to a literal wooden idol. The surviving Oldeners speak the language of the Soviet intelligentsia, and their endless preoccupation with completely irrelevant concerns (party cards, dissidence, whether or not “the West will come to our aid”) renders them laughable. Lev Lvovich’s accusations against Benedikt are completely on target: after gaining unfettered access to Oldenprint books, all Benedikt wants to do is alphabetize them, resulting in a pages-long list of titles and authors whose humor and pathos come from their senseless juxtaposition. Like post-Soviet Russia, Fyodor-Kuzmichsk turns out to be awash with books, but these books can do no good for anyone. Scriptures here are not sacred; instead, they are the textual equivalent of the golden calf. The books are taboo, in Freud’s sense of the term: objects of both worship and terror, they are the final form taken by the unexamined elitism of the intelligentsia: the repression of all culture.

Sheltering in Place

What more appropriate antagonists could there be for a transmedia project that includes novels, interactive websites, and video games than mutated, bloodthirsty librarians? Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 shares Tolstaya’s vague postnuclear scenario, her preoccupation with human degeneration, and her transposition of old or current cultural trends into an imaginary future. Its connection to books and literacy, however, is more ambiguous. Metro 2033 in all its myriad formats is a thoroughly digital phenomenon, ranging from first-person narrator to first-person shooter. Initiated on the author’s blog before its expansion and publication as a book, Metro 2033 has migrated from platform to platform: audiobooks, e-books, paper books, comics, and, most famously, video games (now on PC, Xbox, and Steam). It has spawned sequels (Metro 2034 and Metro 2035, of course), made its way through film development hell, and served as the basis for an expanded set of fictional publications: the multi-authored novels and short stories published as The Universe of Metro 2033 (fifty-nine volumes and counting).

Though the franchise began in prose, its continual transmedia metamorphoses undermine both traditional logocentrism and Romantic notions of the autonomous author. The online versions of the books appear long before their print publication, giving the chance for readers to comment, make suggestions, and contribute to the franchise’s world-building project (through art and music). By contrast, Tolstaya’s novel has won a great deal of acclaim, but one would be hard pressed to find Slynx fan fiction.

Set only twenty years after a nuclear holocaust (as opposed to The Slynx’s two hundred), Metro 2033 offers more possibilities for the survivors to encounter the remains of the past. The premise is appealingly simple: the survivors of the war have taken refuge in Moscow’s vast Metro system, devolving into clans centered around the various stations. Under constant threat from mutated rats and the mysterious Dark Ones (Chernye), about whom little is known, they live in a state of continuous military readiness. The novel’s hero, Artyom, was rescued from a rat attack as a small child and raised by a man at the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh) station. Now an adult, Artyom meets a mysterious man named Hunter (Khanter), who sends him on a quest to stop the Dark Ones. After a series of adventures and misadventures, Artyom finds his way to Ostankino Tower; from there, he can fire missiles at the Botanical Gardens and destroy the Dark Ones forever. In a twist straight out of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Artyom learns that the Dark Ones meant no harm, but his discovery comes too late.

On the whole, Metro 2033 is much less book-haunted than The Slynx—among the many aspects of the novel that could be considered a critique of contemporary Russia is the portrayal of the surviving humans as a largely postliterate society. When the possibility of a powerful, virtually magic book is raised two-thirds of the way through the novel, one could easily dismiss it as just another talisman to be collected in a tale whose structure owed much to video games long before it was adapted into one. The hunt for a particular book (or “Book”) owes as much to the novel’s concern for Moscow architecture as to anything else: the Book can only be found in the Russian State Library. Whether the library itself has become a source of magic, or whether its mystique is a function of the survivors’ ignorance remains unclear. Most of the information about the library is provided by Artyom’s traveling companion, Daniel, who approaches his topic with all the reverence of a cargo cultist:

“The card catalogue,” said Daniel quietly, looking around with reverence. “The future can be foretold using these drawers. The initiated know how. After a ritual, you blindly pick one of the cabinets, then randomly pull on a drawer and take any card. If the ritual is properly performed, then the name of the book will foretell your future, provide a warning, or predict success.”

But Daniel’s attitude toward the library proves justified, at least as far as the feral librarians are concerned:

Two grey humped figures emerged from behind the corner of the building he and Daniel were in. They made their way slowly across the courtyard, as if they were searching for something. Suddenly, one of the creatures stopped and raised its head, and Artyom felt as if it was looking directly at the window at which he was standing… .

“Librarians?” he whispered with alarm, also squatting so as not to be visible from the street.

They clearly have paranormal abilities, and when they gut Daniel with their bare claws, they somehow read his mind and ventriloquize his words. Typically, Glukhovsky seems to want to have it both ways: to affirm the magic while also indulging in bathos. As Daniel dies, he gives Artyom a “bloodstained pasteboard rectangle … the card Daniel had taken out of the card catalogue drawer in the vestibule. The card read: ‘Shnurkov, N. E., Irrigation and the prospects for agriculture in the Tadzhik SSR. Dushanbe, 1965.’ They come to the library in search of a book that tells the future, but only find a bibliographic reference to a maximally irrelevant relic of the past.”

Like Tolstaya, Glukhovsky uses his end-times scenario for satirical purposes, transforming the Moscow Metro system into a microcosm of Russian historical, political, and intellectual trends. Here, too, the search for verisimilitude pays few dividends; the bands of survivors at the various stations display an unlikely sense of history and irony. The Ring Line (the Metro’s outer belt, which connects with all the other lines) is managed by a coalition of trading partners who call themselves the “Hanseatic League.” The Red Line is controlled by unreconstructed communists (naturally); the remaining scientists and intellectuals are called Brahmins; a religious retreat run by fanatics is called the Watchtower; and the majority of Metro society is in conflict with fascists who actually call themselves the Fourth Reich. The agenda behind Metro 2033’s taxonomy is not a realist one, nor is it, strictly speaking, science fictional; realism would put a premium on the post-catastrophic order’s psychological and political plausibility, while science fiction would apply similar principles in the name of world building. This is not to say that Metro 2033 does not “work,” but it works according to the principles of its author’s satirical worldview and agenda, as well as the canons of computer games.

As with The Slynx, Glukhovsky’s debt to Chernobyl is obvious, but there is a crucial difference. Metro 2033 situates itself within a particular Russian science fiction tradition, first borrowing from it but then pushing it forward. The world of Metro 2033 includes the now-ubiquitous “stalkers,” men who venture out of the subway system for valuable goods and intelligence. The inspiration is, of course, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (Piknik na obochine, 1971) and its adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (1979). Though “stalker” is originally an English word, its use in Russian is quite specific, and it lacks, for example, the connection with sexual predation. When adopted by Glukhovsky for what turned out to be the first international transmedia hit to come out of the former Soviet Union, the stalker becomes a fixture of post-Soviet science fictional adventure, as ubiquitous as the robot was to American Golden Age science fiction. The example of Metro 2033 inspired another transmedia project that has grown even bigger than Glukhovsky, a work of stalker-like salvage and bricolage that combines all the primary tropes of post-Soviet, post-apocalyptic entertainment: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a set of Ukrainian-made, Russian-language first-person shooters that have also become a successful series of novels and comics.

Returning to the primal scene of Soviet catastrophe, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. unapologetically “borrows” the basic scenario outlined by the Strugatsky brothers and Tarkovsky, but with a crucial difference: now the “zone of exclusion” into which the stalkers venture is not the byproduct of an alien incursion but the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. The post-apocalyptic future looks more and more like a nightmare reconstituted out of the Soviet past.

Empire State

The Russian post-apocalypse takes place in the future while subverting any conventional expectation of the future as “progress.” The post-apocalyptic future negates forward movement in both time and space. In all of the examples we have looked at, Russia is moving backward and shrinking at the same time. Catastrophes on the scale depicted in these stories are lethal to large-scale state structures, obliging all the survivors to live in a world that is hyperlocal. To the extent that Russia endures, it exists only as far as the eye can see or the legs can walk. From a Putinist point of view, these are tragic visions. It is the state that is the subject and hero of history, particularly of Russian history. At best, the future death of Russian statehood is a Putinist cautionary tale; at worst, it is simply inimical to the values of a system that puts sovereignty above all else.

It should be no surprise that nationalist imaginings of Russia’s future are completely different. A positive vision of tomorrow’s Russia usually has the trappings of empire. Again and again, Russia’s future depends on political hegemony and geographic expansionism. Fortunately, empire (in both its Russian and Eurasianist forms) is one of the most commonly studied themes in post-Soviet F&SF, probably because it is both prevalent and timely. Eurasianism is a particularly productive framework for alternate Russias rooted in significantly different histories. Holm van Zaichik’s multivolume Eurasian Symphony, for example, is a series of mysteries set in the conjoined “OrdRuss” Empire (a merger of Russia and China), while Pavel Krusanov’s The Angel’s Kiss charts a similarly Eastern path for Russia’s imperial development.

Curiously, there are two important overlapping but ideologically contradictory visions of a Russian imperial future that are not based on a particularly Eurasian vision. They turn, instead, to the Russian Middle Ages: Mikhail Yuriev’s The Third Empire and Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik. Less SovPunk than Medieval Punk, these books are an exercise in double extrapolation: they obviously use a medieval framework, but that is in the service of building on then-contemporary political and ideological trends. These two authors’ goals are, of course, in complete contradiction with each other. Yuriev imagines a repressive hegemonic medieval Russia as a utopia, part of a grand vision for the world in which there is no room for anything that is not grand. Sorokin, by contrast, has created a dystopia that is as compelling in its own way as 1984. Yet each is using the same historical and fantastic source material.

There is nothing novel about writing about these two authors together; the commonalities are too obvious to ignore. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it is The Third Empire that has gotten more renewed attention, for, as several critics have noted, the book looks like a pretty precise blueprint for Putin’s bloody war and its 2014 antecedent (Ball; Bershidsky; Khapaeva). I would not deny the accuracy of this comparison, but I am always concerned when criticism lapses into the familiar and problematic pattern of analyzing science fiction in terms of how well it predicts the future. The important thing about The Third Empire is not that the author somehow got it right, but that he and his ideological opponents correctly laid bare the ideological forces animating Putinism.

As Maria Snegovaya notes, The Third Empire is not just medieval futurism; it reflects a set of ideas that have currency in both Russia and the West (“Ukrainskie sobytiia”). The Third Empire is a utopia that is medieval in form but Huntingtonian in content. In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington insisted that, in the wake of the Cold War, history would be driven by the conflicts among civilizations rather than ideologies or nations, primarily the “West” (basically NATO and its partners), Latin America, the Muslim world, the “East” (Asia minus Australia and New Zealand), sub-Saharan Africa, and the Orthodox world. Huntington’s thesis is important not for the soundness of his ideas (whose oversimplification, arbitrariness, and underlying racism have been repeatedly demonstrated) but for their appeal and influence.² The allure of Huntington is emotional, political, and aesthetic; it is as much a politicized fandom as the Russian Internet denizens who insist that Tolkien’s Orcs can be turned into a positive image of Russian power (Borenstein, Soviet Self-Hatred). In each case, the best question to be asked is: what is it about that person’s worldview that makes these ideas so attractive?

Huntington has proven so popular in Putin’s Russia as to suggest a useful adaptation for Huntington’s thesis: Putinism is a Huntingtonian civilization. As a work of speculation, The Clash of Civilizations is somewhere between geopolitical cosplay and an extended tournament of Risk; as a framework influencing leaders of actual countries (let alone nuclear powers), it becomes even more disturbing when the war toys deployed in the game are not, in fact, toys. But for the narrative to truly take hold, it must repeat itself in endless iterations, preferably localized ones. Yuriev’s Third Empire does the important ideological labor of moving Huntington from political theory (i.e, “science”) to the realm of national myth, which is encoded so well in Russian fantasy and science fiction.³ Once Huntingtonism is Russified by means of the fantasy genre, it can re-enter Russian discourse as an explicitly Russian phenomenon, presenting Huntington’s clash of civilizations as an ideological structure that was always already essential to Russian statehood (the medieval past) and crucial to Russia’s future (in the Third Empire).

Imperial Bedtime Stories

Is it fair to call Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik a dystopia and The Third Empire a utopia, simply based on what is widely known about each author’s politics? Perhaps it is fair, but it is not particularly sophisticated. Yuriev, however, includes a number of textual clues for even the not-so-careful reader.

The most obvious clue is that the author does not seem to bother making the book interesting. That is, it has no real characters or plot. Instead, like such classics of the genre as Thomas More’s Utopia, The Third Empire is part travelogue, part history lesson, with the only continuity of character provided by the underdeveloped figure of the narrator. Nineteenth-century utopias would try (often in vain) to improve on this form, grafting on a love plot (Looking Backward) or a quasi-legal drama (Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s Herland), but, if anything, these innovations just showed exactly how poorly the utopian text tends to function as a novel.

Wisely, Yuriev dispenses with the fiction that he is writing, well, fiction (in the sense of having an actual story). Instead, the entire book is a report by a Brazilian who has studied and traveled in the Third Empire, an attempt to explain this fascinating structure to outsiders. This external framework (common to many fantasy novels as well) provides an excuse for the narrative’s main task: dumping huge amounts of information on the reader.

This is not to say that the book is without its pleasures; if that were the case, it is unlikely anyone would read it. The Third Empire may fall flat when considered as a novel, but it has a great deal going for it when understood as a political tract. Like the utopias of old, Yuriev’s book does not have to develop a dry, grounded, theoretical argument while trying to convince his readers to embrace his vision of a better future. Instead, he can describe this future as if it already exists, relieving him of some of the burden of plausibility by letting him simply declare that possibly unlikely events have already happened.

After a brief retelling of the history of the Soviet Union (the Second Empire) and the 1990s that consists of referring to historical figures by monarchical names (Joseph the First; Boris the Cursed) and placing a decidedly pro-totalitarian, antiliberal spin on events, the narrator’s tale begins in the time of Vladimir II, the man who will reconstitute the Third Empire. Though he is not actually named, there is no pretense that we are talking about anyone other than Vladimir Putin. The story begins at roughly the same time as the book’s publication but extends much further in time. This is a future history of Putin’s Russia extrapolating from what was then current events, imagining an apocalyptic scenario, and indulging in a great deal of national imperialist wish-fulfillment fantasy.

During the period of “reforms” and “recovery” (vosstanovlenie) that begins in the year of the book’s publication, Vladimir II abolishes the oligarchs and begins the process of territorial expansion, eventually including Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Transnistria, and parts of Abkhazia in a new Russian Union. Everyone is perfectly happy to join the new Union, as they all understand that the collapse of the USSR was not a natural process but the result of US machinations (as were nearly all the terrorist incidents that took place in the post-Soviet space). When his second and constitutionally mandated final term as presidency comes to an end in 2008, Vladimir II remains in power in this successor to the Russian Federation.

He reminds his subjects that Russia has always been “a separate, ancient, and self-sufficient civilization,” one where status is more important than money and where “personal success” cannot give life meaning (61). The renewed pride in all things Russian extends to the pettiest of details, from the calendar (back to the Julian system!) to motor vehicles (no longer will the automobile-driving population face the indignity of license plates using Latin rather than Cyrillic letters!).

Still, Vladimir merely lays the groundwork for his successor, Gavril the Great. Gavril wins the presidency in 2012 and holds a successful referendum transforming the Russian Union into the Third Russian Empire, under a system of governance to which we will return shortly. As a result of the West’s overreactions to Gavril’s foreign policy (and his decision to stop selling gas to Europe), Russia and NATO go to war. Thanks to the superiority of the Russian military and the convenient discovery of new types of weaponry with no basis in scientific fact, the war lasts twelve days, ending in the total capitulation of the United States.

And this is where the wish-fulfillment fantasy truly comes to the fore, as Gavril arranges a parade in honor of Russia’s great victory:

[A] plane carried America’s elites arrested especially for this occasion (and sent back home and released the very next day) to be displayed on Red Square: President Bush III [Jeb] and former Presidents Bill Clinton, Bush Jr. [W] and Hillary Clinton, the current and former members of the cabinet, congress, and senate, along with bankers and industrialists, newspaper columnists and television anchors, famous lawyers and top models, pop singers and Hollywood actresses. They all paraded across Red Square in handcuffs with nametags around their necks—everyone except the military prisoners, who walked with full honors. The Russian authorities let their citizens and the whole world understand that Russia fought and defeated not the American army, but American civilization. (106)

Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine, which the leadership has insisted on casting as a proxy between Russian and the West, make it difficult to read The Third Empire as mere fiction. But Yuriev’s novel was by no means the only one to imagine an East/West final battle taking place on Russia’s western border. What really stands out is, instead, the text’s sheer joy in every instance of advancing even the smallest element of what might be called “Russianness,” while imagining a humiliating conquest of the West that is so spectacular as to be virtually pornographic. This, perhaps, is the aspect of The Third Empire that truly warrants praise for its prophecy: the atmosphere of intense ressentiment and xenophobic fury that it shares with Russia during the “special military operation.”

Yuriev’s vision of the Third Empire requires a complete reorganization of the planet along two guiding principles: gigantism and medievalism. Medievalism characterizes the empire itself, while gigantism encompasses both the empire and the rest of the world. Both principles reflect an imagination that is as limited as it is imperialist. The Third Empire’s medieval structure is the source of the book’s fame (or notoriety, depending on one’s political affiliations). The book takes place in the future, but this is a future based on a scientific and social speculation that can only be called impoverished. Scientific progress certainly exists, but it consists of futuristic technology whose sole purpose is to dispel the obvious concerns about the empire’s feasibility. How does the empire defeat the West? It creates a superweapon. How does the state ensure that those responsible for maintaining order are trustworthy rather than corrupt? Russian scientists invent a process called a “tech interrogation” (tekhnodpros) that uses an infallible truth serum. These inventions are brought into the narrative not as a result of extrapolation from scientific trends but as convenient ways to dispense with two of the most common utopian conundrums: how we get from here to there (answer: miraculous scientific weapons!); and, to paraphrase Juvenal and Alan Moore, “Who watches the watchmen?” (answer: drugs!).

All technological innovations in the novel are in the service of making the Third Empire’s New Medievalism possible. Yuriev’s future entails rejecting virtually every feature developed by liberal democracy since the Enlightenment; indeed, it rejects the Enlightenment itself. There can be no state institutions that are in any way based on regularly assessing the will of the people as a whole because the polity itself is redefined. First, Gavril convinces a willing Russian populace to abolish the presidency in favor of an imperial autocracy, somehow using this one last popular vote to set up an institution whose authority would no longer be beholden to the will of the people. This is not without precedent. The Romanov dynasty began with the election of the new tsar by a national assembly of nobles in 1613. Yuriev, however, creates a polity that is not rooted in nobility. Instead, the Third Empire is based on a very narrow slice of medieval Russian history: the oprichnina.

The oprichnina, which lasted for only seven years in the mid-sixteenth century, looms large over Russian history. Instituted by Ivan the Terrible at the height of his paranoia, the oprichnina was a response to his conviction that the aristocracy was plotting to overthrow him. The oprichnina was both a territory administered under different rules from the rest of Russia and the system that made this territory possible. Ivan wanted to be free of what he felt were the onerous restrictions that prevented him from prosecuting the traitors he was sure surrounded him. The result was a reign of terror against nobles he accused of treason, conducted by a special guard unit (the oprichniks) that reported directly to him. Where liberals see the oprichnina as the earliest instantiation of the repressive forces that periodically dominate throughout Russian history, conservatives and traditionalists view the oprichnina as the kind of extralegal force for truth and justice that can prosper only in a harmonious, undemocratic system unconstrained by petty procedure. In the face of widespread corruption and self-interest, the oprichnina is a model for dispensing with the complexities of liberal institutions that promise fairness but cannot deliver.

This is one of the main aspects of the oprichnina that Yuriev develops in The Third Empire: the new oprichnina is a set of anti-institutional institutions. Nothing about the system Yuriev describes would reassure the individual looking for procedural guarantees of justice and fairness. Instead, the reintroduction of what is essentially an estate system treats people in their aggregates, according to the category in which they are classified. This is certainly the case with the nations the Third Empire eventually conquers. Everyone’s status after incorporation within the empire depends on their national/ethnic classification, with little room for exceptions on an individual basis. The Third Empire even returns to Stalinist notions of collective justice, with entire peoples being exiled and resettled according to imperial policy. In the case of the oprichniks, this is the class of people who are allowed to vote and take part in political life but accept other restrictions to their personal liberty for the sake of the imperial good. The lack of consideration for the individual is precisely the sort of thing that one would expect from The Third Empire if it were a dystopia, but the book’s nature as an antiliberal, antidemocratic utopia renders individualism alien and undesirable.

This emphasis on the group over the individual is not simply a rejection of liberalism; it is something that replicates itself throughout The Third Empire on every scale. In Yuriev’s utopia, size is everything. The empire has no patience for dealing with small political or national units. This is where Yuriev’s Huntingtonism comes in. The entire world ends up divided into megastates, empires whose internal composition and political structure may differ vastly from those of the Third Empire but share with it the aesthetic and ideology of gigantism that animates the book. The Americas are reconstituted as a supra-national state united by cultural and religious ties, while most of Europe becomes part of the Third Empire. The Vatican moves to North America, which is now primarily Catholic thanks to the subsuming of Protestantism back into the Catholic Church. Protestantism, with its proliferation of squabbling churches and doctrinal differences, has no place in this new world order. The Islamic Khalifate, the Indian Confederation, and the Celestial Republic (i.e., China) round out the rest of the globe.

Yuriev’s neomedieval vision is civilizational, categorical, and antithetical to the varieties of pluralism that have no place in his vision of empire. What The Third Empire offers is a simple world, where deviation from the principle that guides a given civilization is at best superfluous and at worst pernicious. This is not a Soviet future; even if we consider the Soviet Union to be an empire, it was built on the careful curation of accepted categories of difference, such as nationality and language. But it is consistent with the kind of nostalgia that sees the Soviet past as proof against corruption, and as a time when people were united by a common ideal. As Marielle Wijermars explains, “The oprichnina [according to its adherents], able to cleanse the political system in a way that the system itself cannot, can move the state from its current state of degradation and stagnation towards innovation” (176).

New Medievalism, like Soviet nostalgia, is a rejection of politics as such, imagining a harmonious world governed by a shared understanding of the social good. It is a huge gamble, sacrificing any possibility for individual recourse or institutional checks and balances in favor of a system that will somehow inherently foster justice. Who needs politics when you can make a blind leap of faith?

The Executioner’s Song

In Day of the Oprichnik, Vladimir Sorokin builds a world on roughly the same premise as The Third Empire, with a critical difference: Day of the Oprichnik would be hard to mistake for a utopia.⁴ Sorokin could not have been responding to Yuriev; if anything, he is indebted to Beyond the Thistle (Za chertopolokhom), a 1927 novel by the former White General Pyotr Krasnov that describes an isolated, monarchic, quasi-medieval post-Soviet future.⁵ Yet whatever their authors’ intentions or awareness of each other might have been, Sorokin and Yuriev’s books are now forever in dialogue with each other.

Yuriev’s Brazilian narrator provides a bird’s-eye view of the customs of The Third Empire, a book that, besides him, has no characters at all (unless one counts the various emperors). He covers decades of history and replicates the empire’s own sensibility by focusing on groups rather than individuals. The Day of the Oprichnik takes the opposite approach: not only is the eponymous oprichnik, Andrei Komiaga, the first-person narrator, but, in a nod to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag classic, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the action unfolds over a single twenty-four-hour period. Where The Third Empire is essentially a six-hundred-page info dump, Day of the Oprichnik parcels out information about its world at a slow pace, interspersed with both the action of the novel and the thoughts of its protagonist. The result is that, in addition to being the ideological antipode of The Third Empire, Day of the Oprichnik is aesthetically and generically as far from Yuriev’s work as possible. Day of the Oprichnik immerses its readers in Komiaga’s consciousness and lived experience, resulting in something novel in every sense of the word.

Perhaps the most novel aspect of Day of the Oprichnik is its refusal to follow either the utopian or the dystopian master plot. As Gary Saul Morson argues in The Boundaries of Genre, both narrative types replicate the structure of the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic (88–92). These stories are typically epistemological quests, with the protagonist of the dystopia usually starting out as a true believer who, over the course of the novel, comes to realize the flaws of his (and it is usually his) world before joining the resistance.

This is precisely what Komiaga does not do. It would have been an easy task to tell the story of the victims of oprichnik terror and gain the reader’s sympathy. Nor would it have been that difficult to imagine an oprichnik who grows to doubt the rules of the empire. Instead, Sorokin invites (or perhaps forces) identification with a very happy and successful torturer who is as loyal to the regime on the last page as he is on the first. Day of the Oprichnik is where dystopia collides with styob. Styob, as we recall from chapter 3, is the deliberate overidentification with the object of satire. The novel seduces and repulses at the same time, trapping us in the consciousness of a narrator whom most of us would find morally repugnant, but who here becomes something more complicated.

The key to that complication is violence, which is the cornerstone of both Sorokin’s imaginary Russian future and Yuriev’s medieval utopia. Yuriev does not shy away from violence, but he does not dwell on it. It is simply a necessity for the just operations of the Third Empire, and any qualms about its victims are simply the expression of a sentimentality that is detrimental to the administration of justice. Violence has always been at the heart of Sorokin’s work, so its centrality to Day of the Oprichnik is no surprise. Just as his pre-1991 writings focus on physical aggression, rape, murder, and cannibalism to expose the true moral underpinnings of the Soviet system, Day of the Oprichnik forces the reader to understand that this kind of medieval/Eurasianist fantasy is inevitably founded on the callous destruction of human bodies. In one of the novel’s best offhand jokes, Komiaga’s ring tone is the sound of a man being tortured (a detail exploited to great effect in the Russian audiobook version).

Komiaga’s day starts with the actual inflicting of physical violence. First, he and his men fight the servants of a disgraced nobleman (“Crack! Crack! The ribs fracture” [17]), hang the nobleman, and then brutally rape his widow (“Important work. Necessary work. Good work” [24]). As a reward, the leader of the oprichniks gives them a drug that lets them fantasize intensely about the kind of violence they have just committed:

I stare and find the first foul creature a forty-two-year-old man wedged in a wardrobe I set the wardrobe on fire; …

I find two children two little girls six and seven hiding under the bed under the wide bed I drench the bed in a wide stream the bed burns the pillows flame the blanket they can’t stand it they scramble out from under the bed run to the door I send a fan of fire after them they run …

my faithful flaming skewer into her narrow womb I send it and its might fills her trembling womb, my flaming skewer fills it she howls inhuman cries and slowly my fiery flaming skewer begins to fuck her to fuck her to fuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. (83)

Granted, few would look at this scene and imagine it as the basis for a positive political program, but the implications are ideological through and through. In a feudalist future inspired by both the medieval past and the increasingly authoritarian present, brutality is the essence of the state’s work. Neomedievalists, Eurasianists, and monarchists all share the fantasy of a state where bureaucracy and proceduralism are replaced by a mythic harmony between the ruler and the ruled. Sorokin’s novel is a savage response to this romantic reactionary idyll. The oprichniks are the violent state’s version of the bureaucrat. Instead of pushing paper, they push people.

But they also push each other. The brotherhood of the oprichikniks is cemented by a ritual that Batya (the leader) arranges for them at midnight. After the men all strip naked and enter the banya, they each take a drug that gives them erections and makes their genitals glow. In a logistically dubious but decidedly evocative arrangement, the men all engage in group anal sex in a single line, each entering the man in front of him while being entered by the man behind him. This “caterpillar,” as they call it, ends with the serial climax of every man involved. When it is over, Komiaga thinks:

Wisely, oh so wisely, Batya arranged everything with the caterpillar. Before it, everyone broke off in pairs, and the shadow of dangerous disorder lay across the oprichnina. Now there’s a limit to the pleasures of the steam. We work together, and take our pleasure together. And the tablets help. And wisest of all is that the young oprichniks are always stuck at the tail of the caterpillar. This is wise for two reasons: first of all, the young ones know their place in the oprichnik hierarchy; second, the seed moves from the tail of the caterpillar to the head, which symbolizes the eternal cycle of life and the renewal of our brotherhood. On the one hand, the young respect the old; on the other, they replenish them. That’s our foundation. And thank God. (173)

In addition to exposing the obvious homoeroticism in a violent, all-male militaristic organization that routinely rapes women to punish men, this scene reinforces the novel’s presentation of an isolated, self-absorbed Russia whose future is always about its past. Where the traditional symbol of a recursive Russia is the matryoshka doll (a smaller version of the doll within each larger version) this feminine, fertility-based image is replaced by aggressive, recursive homosexual bonding. This is not Russia as a circle but, consistent with the architecture of the novel’s empire (walled off from Europe), Russia as a linear barrier. It is a perfectly self-enclosed, hierarchical system based on penetration and submission. Where Yuriev answers the classic anti-utopian question of responsible self-governance by appealing to innate harmony (plus infallible truth drugs), Sorokin implicitly rephrases the question to be about power and dominance rather than responsibility. Not “Who’s watching the watchmen?” but “Who’s fucking the watchmen?” This is the fundamental problem of autarky: inevitably, the country is fucking itself.

It Gets Better

Sorokin’s future is a deliberately uninviting one; Yuriev’s might resonate with more people, but it requires readers to wade through hundreds of pages of plotless pseudo-history. The Third Empire, however, is not the only “positive” view of a future Russia circulating in the literary world on the Internet. Given the prevalence of post-apocalyptic entertainment throughout the world in general and Russia in particular, a backlash against this grim pessimism was only to be expected. But the campaign for positivity was not without controversy. On June 9, 2021, Konstantin Syomin (Semin) posted a brief video to his AgitProp YouTube channel. Five months later, it had been viewed 47,807 times (as of December 11, 2021) and received 877 comments (nearly all made within a few days of its posting). The volume of response is actually on the lower side for Syomin. A popular journalist who initially made his reputation on the liberal-leaning Vesti news program, he has since become a Marxist with strong nationalist leanings. AgitProp, which started as a broadcast on Russia-24 in 2014, moved entirely to YouTube in 2019 after a falling out with the station’s management.⁶ The channel, which has 136,000 subscribers, touches hot-button issues such as Belarusian protests, the opposition figure Alexei Navalny, and the rapper Oxxxymiron.

This particular video was devoted to a niche issue, directed explicitly at fellow leftists, but with the F&SF community implicated as well: “Why Is the Image of the Radiant Future Useless for AgitProp?” Syomin situates himself within what he calls an “ongoing argument” among “YouTubers, bloggers, and propagandists,” with his comments occasioned by the recent release of an animated video imagining a prosperous USSR in the year 2040 (more on that in a bit). Syomin sees little point in such exercises:

The very idea of competing with liberals or fascists on this level by trying to paint a picture of paradise strikes me as incorrect, because [to get there] there will be a revolution … which means that prior to [the revolution] there will be a period of terrible, awful upheaval, with struggle, loss … This heavenly image that we are collectively trying to convey is … a deception … People will be pushed toward socialism not by the dream of a wonderful, happy, and prosperous life but by the realization that the disgusting, horrifying, intolerable reality can’t go on. Because the natural world has been ruined, because of poverty, hunger, illness, war, and unemployment. These are the horses of the apocalypse to come, when it becomes clear that the fork in the road between socialism and barbarism is unavoidable. There will be a choice between barbarism or socialism, and we must agitate for nonbarbarism.

In rejecting the very idea of optimistic futurism, Syomin manages to be both in and out of step with his time. An aesthetic preference for a dismal future would situate him within the mainstream of public taste in both Russia and the West. In the battle between what young adult authors Holly Black and Justine Larbaleister called “Zombies vs. Unicorns” (the title of their tongue-in-cheek anthology), horror and destruction beat rainbows and puppy dogs nine times out of ten.⁷ But when we shift to politics, the ground beneath us shifts as well. How many fans of The Walking Dead view the television show or comic as a compelling roadmap for a future they wish to build? The (post)apocalypse is a nice place to (vicariously) visit, but few people really want to live there.

The occasion for Syomin’s brief tirade was a curious target. Produced by the popular collective Dumai sam, dumai seichas (Think for Yourself, Think Now, henceforth abbreviated as DSDS), “2045: Episode 1: The Revelations of a Former Millionaire” was released on YouTube on May 1, 2021 (International Workers’ Day), and viewed over 189,000 times as of December 15, 2021 (with 17,000 likes and zero dislikes). DSDS’s most popular videos make the studio’s political orientation clear: “Bound to Wake Up: Class Dream of Humanity” (1 million views) and “The Real Stalin” (972,000 views; spoiler alert: the Real Stalin was a hero, slandered by Khrushchev and counterrevolutionaries). A typical DSDS video combines midlevel video-game style animation with a polemical voiceover to bring simple, communist truths to the viewer. “2045,” however, is a bit different.

“2045” features retrofuturist bombast (enormous statues of cosmonauts, etc.) and a touching, if nonsensical, combination of Soviet realia with fantastic high-tech (walking, talking vending machines offering passersby Soviet-style soft drinks by the glass). Syomin is certainly correct in identifying “2045” as anodyne, if not kitschy, although there is an implication of unrest, if not bloodshed, in the past: the second socialist revolution took place in 2029. But somehow, in just sixteen years, the new Eurasian Alliance has achieved miracles. A news broadcaster tells his viewers (who would, presumably, already know these facts) that rates of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases have plummeted, and that life expectancies are skyrocketing thanks to the revival of two staples of early Soviet health propaganda: a “sober lifestyle” and “physical culture” (cue a brief animation of happy, healthy citizens doing group calisthenics). Even (physical) disabilities are being “solved”: soon any citizen who needs a bionic limb will receive a fully functional one at no cost.

The video’s paper-thin plot tracks the postrevolutionary life of a former oligarch. In 2029, he fully capitulated to the new regime, gave over all his assets, and rehabilitated himself as an ordinary worker in an auto factory. Even in his retirement, he still insists on working. In addition, he has a popular video blog called “Planting with the Oligarch” (the title is a pun referring to both planting seeds and sending someone to prison). The bulk of this thirty-minute video is devoted to an interview with the protagonist, Upyrev (a name that comes from the Russian word for vampire, as if to suggest that he was born to be a capitalist bloodsucker). He readily admits that his old life as a capitalist, while glamorous, was founded on exploitation and misery, and he has nothing but praise for the new world.

Any viewer looking for signs of brainwashing or duress is bound to be disappointed. Voiced by an actor with the velvet tones of a kindly grandfather from central casting, Upyrev is the picture of contentment. In this regard, he fits in perfectly with his surroundings: soporific background music and long, wordless shots of the new Soviet Union’s majestic architecture. “2045: Episode 1,” with its beatifically smiling old man and montages of happy people somehow manages to combine retrocommunist imagery with the kitschy stylings of a late-night commercial for adult diapers.

If the comments are any indication, however, DSDS knows exactly how to inspire its target audience. “Ellen Ripley” writes, “Thank you, it brought me to tears, this is what we’ve been missing for so long: an image of the future, the radiant future!” Bomberfoxx comments: “Now this is something that’s worth dying in battle for. Thank you, authors!” Zarina Dzotsieva agrees: “Finally, positive video material from communists! Thanks, it’s great!” These commenters, along with the thousands of other viewers who upvoted the video, are evaluating it according to criteria that have little in common with those of its critic, Syomin, even though they are all presumably on the same side.

Syomin frames agitational art in general, and “2045” in particular, in terms of its effectiveness as a tool of persuasion, where the viewers are reacting in their capacity as an audience that needs no persuasion. One might then conclude that DSDS is preaching to the choir, but the viewers’ enthusiasm shows the limits of Syomin’s critique. In terms of the revolution that both Syomin and the viewers seem to revere, Syomin’s view of art is more Menshevik: agitational art must enlighten the ignorant and convert the skeptical. Meanwhile, the commenters implicitly understand the value of inspiring the smaller vanguard of conscious revolutionary supporters. Like a fight song, videos such as “2045” rev up the enthusiasm of the people already on your side.

Syomin’s normally loyal audience flooded the comments section with objections. One commenter using the name “Andrei Kapitan” succinctly expressed the view shared by most of his YouTube comrades: “We need an image of the future! Otherwise, it’s not clear where to go and what to strive for!” The debate quickly spilled over from Syomin’s YouTube page and onto various VKontakte and LiveJournal pages.

2061: A Frederic Jameson Odyssey

Syomin’s audience, while clearly literate in science fiction, overlaps with fandom only partly. In rejecting a radiant future, however, he drew the ire of a set of ideological comrades for whom the literary and artistic representation of a twenty-first-century Soviet utopia is of crucial importance: the editorial team behind the USSR-2061 project. I’ll be going into much more detail about their work in a bit; for now, though, it is their polemic with Syomin that is important.

In a LiveJournal post titled “An Image of the Future Is Unnecessary?” by kpt_flint on June 12 (three days after Syomin’s video), one of the founders of USSR-2061 takes apart Syomin’s argument step by step. Why, he asks, should the steady immiseration of everyday life be the only argument? The standard of living in the USSR rose steadily before perestroika, but people still turned away from socialism toward capitalism. And if we don’t paint a picture of the future, our enemies will.

Ultimately, kpt_flint argues for the power of the imagination: “In order to build [a better] world, we must first understand what exactly we want to build … For that, we need red science fiction and red futurology. Honest, thoughtful, and scientific.”

kpt_flint casts the political argument as a struggle between genres. Dystopian fiction has tended to be more entertaining, but he is unwilling to write off utopianism as both political program and fictional genre. Yes, the radiant future easily descends into a set of familiar clichés (which is why kpt_flint and his partner in the USSR-2061 project are at such pains to steer participants clear of a whole host of aesthetic and political sins), but that only means that imagining a convincing utopia takes much more work than churning out the latest variation on 1984 or Brave New World. Pessimism is easy; optimism is not for the lazy or the faint of heart.

At the beginning of this chapter, I claimed that after the Cold War, the West inherited the discursive tools for imagining the future. The polemics occasioned by “2045: Episode 1” remind us that this custody battle is as much about Left and Right as it is about East and West. After 1989/1991, what avenues remained for imagining an alternative to an increasingly hegemonic neoliberal capitalism? In a much more reader-friendly fashion, the Marxist kpt_flint is making largely the same argument as the critic Frederic Jameson, particularly in his Archaeologies of the Future.

Best known as one of North America’s foremost Marxist literary theorists, Jameson is also an accomplished scholar of science fiction. Archaeologies of the Future, in addition to being a comprehensive typology of American postwar science fiction, takes as its project the aesthetic and political rehabilitation of utopia and utopianism. As both genre and political theory, utopia has long been the whipping boy of sophisticated critics. Marxism, with its explicit refutation of utopianism (despite its obvious utopian elements), rendered utopian socialism passé, while the excess of communist regimes in the twentieth century have fueled the long-standing conservative critique of leftism as naïvely utopian in its understanding of ‘human nature.” If anything, the fate of utopia in literature has been even more dismal. As Gary Saul Morson (no friend to utopians or leftists) puts it, utopia and the novel are opposites. Utopias are tendentious, plotless, and boring almost by definition. Utopias are analogous to the “all happy families” Tolstoy invokes in the first line of Anna Karenina; we may want our family to be happy, but it is the unhappy family that will keep us reading over the course of several hundreds of pages.

Jameson does not try to pretend that the utopian classics are more interesting than they seem, though he does champion modern novels whose utopian aspirations are not an obstacle to reading pleasure. Utopianism is particularly redeemed in his reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, about the settling and transformation of our neighboring planet. Robinson populates Mars with complex, flawed, and believable characters who often violently disagree about the proper course of action but still manage to create a society that is, if not perfect, far closer to perfection than anything the Earth has ever seen. Utopia for Robinson is a process, not a place, as Jameson explains: “What is Utopian becomes, then, not the commitment to a specific machinery or blueprint, but rather the commitment to imagining possible Utopias as such, in their greatest variety of forms. Utopia is no longer the invention and defense of a specific floorplan, but rather the story of all the arguments about how Utopia should be constructed in the first place. It is no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the story of its production and of the very process of construction as such” (217).

With its focus on utopia-in-the-making, Robinson’s trilogy is an unusually successful example of a compelling engagement with utopian thought. Even in works that do not share Robinson’s focus on process, however, Jameson sees utopia as a crucial exercise in political imagination: “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). Or, in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin in her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Though Jameson is writing specifically about science fiction, his defense of utopia, particularly in light of the online arguments about Russia’s radiant future, should push the reader in the direction of SF’s most famous allied genre (despite Jameson’s own apparent lack of interest in it): fantasy. Or rather, the multiple meanings carried by the genre’s name. Perhaps the argument over utopia is a proxy for a larger debate about fantasy itself? “Fantasy” also connotes “imagination” (in Russian, the two meanings are divided between two very similar words, fantastika and fantaziia, along with the more recently imported term for epic fantasy, fentezi), while for Freud, fantasy can refer to either something desired or something dreaded. Jameson subtitles his book “The Desire Called Utopia, and Other Science Fictions”; might utopia and dystopia map onto Freud’s positive and negative fantasies?

What is at stake in the post-Soviet Russian fantasies of a Soviet future (and perhaps in their shadow, the coming apocalyptic hellscape), is the function and value of this kind of imaginative play. What does the Soviet future fantasy actually do? Is it a form of banal entertainment, an opiate for the nostalgic post-Soviet masses? A call to action? A productive exercise of the political imagination? A return of repressed anxiety and desire?

For that, we must look at both the USSR-2061 project and the broader aesthetic phenomenon sometimes called SovPunk.

SovPunk, Indirectly

Depending on just how online one is, SovPunk is either a marginal phenomenon that sounds vaguely familiar or a useful term for a style that is all over the Internet but is only just taking shape as a primarily visual trend. Also called “Sovietpunk,” the word usually refers to the deployment of Soviet aesthetic signifiers in futuristic or apocalyptic settings.

The term jumped the species barrier from online chatter to highbrow fiction with the publication of Aleksei Salnikov’s book Indirectly (Oposredovanno [2018/2019]).⁸ Indirectly is the third novel by this Yekaterinburg-based author, whose star has been steadily rising. His second novel, The Petrovs in and around the Flu, was awarded two of Russia’s most prestigious literary prizes in 2018 (NOS and the National Bestseller), adapted for the stage twice, and made into a film by the leading director Kirill Serebrennikov in 2021. While I have no statistics on readership, it is safe to say that a new release by Salnikov is guaranteed attention from Russian intellectuals.

Indirectly gets to the idea of SovPunk … indirectly. The novel is set in an alternate world that is fundamentally the same as ours but with one major distinction: poems are considered a narcotic. The book’s last chapter features a conversation with one of the supporting characters, Dmitry, a writer who another character claims has recently given up the fantasy (fentezi) genre to which he had dedicated his career. But Dmitry explains that he has not given up on fantasy at all:

It’s just that one day I was reading one of our contemporary classics and suddenly realized that they’re writing fantasy, just like me. It’s just the genre hasn’t been named yet; to myself, I’ve been calling it “sovpunk”; that is, there’s cyberpunk, steampunk, and in Russia we now have the sovpunk genre, and not only in Russia. There’s light sovpunk, which borrows the Odessa film studio aesthetic whole cloth; there’s dark sovpunk, which is dominant, and it’s the basis for a whole host of things, like a gross political officer harassing a lady, bullying her family one after another, and then it’s payback time, or he bullies an engineer out of envy, does something awful, then there’s the barking of the Gulag German shepherds … People just put their heroes in this prefab scenery and use these plots, moving between the camps, the factory … the communal apartment and the party meeting, an endless board game, where you already know what the book is, because it’s like the Conan series, which has had shitloads of sequels slapped onto it … There are lots of subgenres, like soft sovpunk without camps, but with some intellectual’s travails, and he’s surrounded by such thugs, such thugs!

Presumably Salnikov got the word “sovpunk” from the Internet, in which case his distortion of the term is probably willful. Salnikov’s comparison of SovPunk to steampunk and cyberpunk makes sense, but it is clear that he is interpreting them all primarily as historically inflected styles: if it looks Victorian, it’s steampunk; if it looks futuristic, it’s cyberpunk; and if it looks Soviet, it’s SovPunk. Salnikov’s SovPunk is the opposite of the phenomenon as it’s generally understood. Rather than taking place in the present or future, his SovPunk is closer to historical fiction, and its preoccupation with misery resembles that of 1990s’ chernukha. In Indirectly, SovPunk is the antithesis of the rosy Soviet nostalgia that has taken hold in the twenty-first century. If it describes a literary trend, it is the liberal intellectual response to two decades of soft-peddling Stalinism. His SovPunk would fit Guzel Yakhina’s dekulakization novel, Zuleikha, and its 2020 television adaptation, even as the actual SovPunk on the Internet would be much more acceptable to Zuleikha’s many detractors (who condemned the novel and the series as exaggerations of Stalin’s crimes).

Salnikov’s displacement of SovPunk to the past highlights what is actually at stake: the extent to which Soviet history says something about Russia today and can serve as a model for Russia tomorrow. Like it or not, the Soviet Union now matters. Though the fantasy writer in Indirectly dwells much more on the negative, he does mention SovPunk’s “light” variety, which means that really any story that seems to go out of its way to immerse the reader in Soviet realia is SovPunk, regardless of any given ideological spin. This is Salnikov’s own “fantasy” of SovPunk; to borrow a phrase from the Brezhnev era, “actually existing SovPunk” tends to be both “light” and aggressively pro-Soviet. Salnikov’s apparently deliberate misprision of SovPunk in Indirectly nevertheless does valuable work, however indirectly. Salnikov’s version of SovPunk renders it a form of wish fulfillment or sympathetic magic. The important thing is not the ideological content but the simple fact of the reconstruction of the Soviet Union in the realm of the imagination. This version of SovPunk, then, is an aesthetic variation on the work of the Citizens of the USSR from chapter 3: a recreation of a lost world through the assertion of sheer will.

The Red Cape Diaries

It took over a decade of evolution and mutation in the memetic stew of the Internet before SovPunk made its way to old media, through Salnikov’s novel. Perhaps this is how it earns its “punk” label: dredging up the analog visual culture of a world marked by a notoriously restrictive information regime, only to let it prosper on what used to be the free-for-all of post-Soviet cyberspace. Sovietpunk (as it was more commonly called) first appeared on an obscure forum before finding new homes on VKontakte, YouTube, and Reddit. In all these spaces, SovPunk is marginal, but its proponents often use it to lay claim to more mainstream post-Soviet pleasures, from well-known video games and transmedia franchises (such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) to hit TV series (Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone, of course) and even, stretching the aesthetic ties to their breaking point, the blockbuster cartoon Masha and the Bear. In other words, SovPunk is actually popular, but the people who like it don’t know that this is what they’re seeing.

In October 2015, a LiveJournal user going by the handle “siesit siesit” posted a brief history of Sovietpunk (“Chto takoe Sovetpank”), which was then rewritten and republished a few months later (without attribution) on the Russian Orthodox website eparkhia.ru (“Sovetpank kak forma”). (The eparkhia.ru version has the advantage of being more compact, but the LiveJournal post has more illustrations.) siesit siesit traces Sovietpunk back to the now-moribund forum lomasm.ru, which hosted a discussion in 2007 about creating a thread for fans of the USSR. Their initial name for this community, “Union Maniac” (Soiuz man’iak), was perhaps too ambiguous (and too aggressive); siesit siesit claims that the “Union Maniac” aesthetic was obviously a real phenomenon, but the term describes a person rather than a set of tastes. “Sovietpunk” and “SovPunk” would prove more useful and appropriate.

siesit siesit divided Sovietpunk into three categories: style, genre, and history. “Style” concerns mostly illustrations and video games; anything that reproduces Soviet realia in its background ends up counting as Sovietpunk. Most of the examples he cites could simply be chalked up to Soviet nostalgia (which, indeed, he sees as the foundation of all varieties of Sovietpunk), with one intriguing exception: the now-defunct Internet meme featuring a superhero called “The Red Cape” (Krasnyi plashch’).⁹ A character implies something more than a mere style; a character might have a story. Granted, the Red Cape memes do not pretend to form anything like a coherent narrative, but at the very least, the Red Cape functions as a folk hero with a set of traits making him recognizable from one meme to the next.

For a character who emerged from a Soviet nostalgia forum, the Red Cape has a surprising tendency toward political ambiguity. To begin with, his appearance is less heroic than it is off-putting. We only see him from the waist up, a Soviet flag draped across his shoulders and a green gas mask covering his head. He is as far from the smiling, spandex-clad classic superheroes of North American comics as could be. In real life, his presence would likely cause panic (“Why is he wearing a gas mask, and how can I get one?”).¹⁰ Surrounded by the trappings of Soviet life, he is both a throwback to another time and a visitor from a post-apocalyptic future.

No matter the subject, all the Red Cape memes are too ironic to be taken entirely at face value. In one of the rare memes based on a drawing rather than a photo, a young Red Cape is walking with his mother and father, all three wearing the familiar gas mask, accompanied by a text that rhymes in Russian (“His parents raised / The Red Cape, / Following the precepts of Ilich” [Lenin]) (lomasm, “Sleduia zavetam”). In another, the Red Cape examines a map of the United States placed on top of a drawing of a mushroom cloud: “Ah, Comrade Kurchatov, where are you when we need you?—the Red Cape” (Kurchatov was the father of the Soviet atomic bomb) (siesit siesit, “Gde zhe ty”). In a third, he looks out over a bleak urban landscape and thinks, “Every day, life is getting more joyous!” (lomasm, “Vse radostnee zhit’). Even the Red Cape’s alleged heroism is more humorous than serious. One meme has the Red Cape sitting alone at his kitchen table, resting his head against one hand while staring down at an empty plate and a bottle of vodka: “The Red Cape spent the whole day saving the Soviet Union. And now he’s a little depressed” (siesit siesit, “Chet priunyl”).

If this is nostalgia for the good old days of the Soviet Union, it is a nostalgia that must always take a back seat to irony. Much of the pleasure to be found in a Red Cape meme comes from the contrast between the Red Cape’s function as an (at times, literal) icon and his visual appearance, which is always somewhere between the ominous and the ridiculous. In one meme, a young boy waving a Soviet flag stares at the icon of the Red Cape on the wall: “Happy New Year, Beloved Red Cape” (lomasm, “S novym godom”). In another, the Red Cape points to an instructional display about proper gas mask use, but his finger’s position is reminiscent of Russian Orthodox saints. The tag line under the picture combines the diction of Leninism and the New Testament: “And let he who has no gas mask sell his clothing to buy a gas mask. The Red Testament of the Red Cape” (the word for “testament” here, of course, refers to the Bible, but it is also the same one used for Lenin’s “precept” in one of the memes discussed above) (lomasm, “Krasnyi zavet”). Yet the Red Cape is no friend of the Church: “They say you said something negative about the ROC [Russian Orthodox Church]?—Me? Like I could give a shit?” (lomasm, “Da na kher”). If the Red Cape is leading his viewers on a path to Soviet nostalgia as a political program, it is the same path originally taken by the alt-right appropriation of Pepe the Frog: with irony paving the way for something deadly earnest. In any case, the Red Cape is out of Pepe’s league: he survives as a historical curiosity in the development of SovPunk rather than as an effective tool for post-Soviet red-pilling.

The Couch Potatoes of Developed Socialism

Despite the origins of SovPunk in the “Union Maniac” community, some of its theorists and interpreters insisted on the movement’s nonaggressive character. Their ideal SovPunk seemed to be the unlikely offspring of the highly militarized late Soviet culture and the milder aesthetic subculture it spawned in the 1980s, the Mitki (whose slogan was “The Mitki don’t want to defeat anyone”). As siesit siesit puts it: “this ‘movement’ is not destructive; the subculture’s goal is not overthrowing the current order and the violent return to socialism. Everyone must understand the USSR is no more and will never be again, and if something like it is ever formed in the future, it will be something new, a new era.”

siesit siesit is making a crucial distinction here between fantasy and a political program, since he also specifically includes an alternate history in which the USSR never collapsed, but instead became a superpower greater than all others, “taking only the best from the old USSR we knew, that is, an extended and improved USSR 2.0,” while still allowing for the possibility of a more negative alternate USSR. Particularly noteworthy is his description of the SovPunk’s typical hero. Like so many of the Time Crashers we examined earlier, this hero is an only slightly idealized version of the story’s imaginary reader, with a touch of socialist realism: “A dreamer, a student, a scientist, or simply a worker; humble, a bit naive, but still dashing, but still, as a rule, without any particularly supernatural superpowers; everything he achieves is thanks to work, persistence, and knowledge.”

Perhaps this hero should have been siesit siesit’s starting point. This hero is a Mary Sue, but only barely, capable of more than the genre’s readers might be yet with skills that are not quite unattainable. For him to be effective, the SovPunk world in which he operates must be, as the Russians like to put it, “vegetarian,” with no room for bloodthirsty tyrants or fanatical revolutionaries. It is a Soviet Union made to order for its hero, rather than the expression of political yearnings or the result of copious historical research. It is a USSR as Star Trek holodeck program, with all the safety protocols dutifully enabled.

Like so many nostalgic productions, SovPunk is anti-entropic: the past cannot be allowed simply to be gone. The sheer evocation of the vanished era is both a balm for melancholia and the insistence on melancholia’s permanence, externalizing the feeling of endless loss as something that can be seen, enjoyed, mourned, and visited. SovPunk is fundamentally a refusal to let go and move on. But it is also playful and creative. If we look at the USSR as the equivalent of a dead loved one, SovPunk does not insist on preserving its beloved in amber. By the same token, SovPunk is melancholic but not psychotic, with no need to mummify the mother(land) like Norman Bates does his mother in Hitchcock’s classic film. To continue the comparison with Psycho a bit longer, the SovPunk community is not dressing in drag and pretending to be its dead mother but indulging in cosplay and having a good time.

In many cases, SovPunk is literally a game. The list of SovPunk exemplars inevitably includes a set of video games with an aesthetic derived from the Soviet past. Besides Metro 2033, some of the most famous games to earn the SovPunk classification are American or European rather than purely post-Soviet. From 1996 to 2009, the popular Westwood Studios franchise Command & Conquer produced games in its Red Alert subseries (along with several expansion packs and an iOS version). Set in an alternate timeline that managed to avoid World War II only to see Stalin invade Europe in 1946, it develops both a counterfactual Soviet past and an equally fanciful Soviet “present” in the 1990s (in Counterstrike, one of the expansion packs).¹¹ Though both the Allied and the Soviet factions are playable, the game designers cannot be bothered to hide their Western bias. The results are entertaining (particularly Tim Curry’s meme-worthy performance as a Soviet premier declaring his intention to escape into the “one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism—space!”) But Russian enthusiasm for the Soviet particularities of the games leaves plenty of space for irony,

By contrast, Russian-produced SovPunk video games have the home field advantage. Not only are their creators better acquainted with Soviet regalia, but they presumably have a stronger sense of what might appeal to gamers in the post-Soviet space. On the Russian-language Internet, every announcement of a new SovPunk-inflected game inevitably draws comparison to Endless Summer (Beskonechnoe leto), a game whose informal development began in 2008 before its commercial release in December 2013 on PCs (made available on Steam the following year). Endless Summer is not the first visual novel (a term for games combining animation, video clips, and text) to be created in Russia, but its iconic status in Russian gaming is so undisputed that the opening paragraph to an article on the history of Russian visual novels posted to stopgrame.ru in 2019 reminds the reader that the genre did not begin with this famous game (Stillbro).

Endless Summer appears to be a deliberately derivative story, built as much on allusion as on innovation. The plot, at least initially, is typical Time Crasher material: the hero falls asleep on a bus in 2009 and wakes up as a seventeen-year-old on his way to a Soviet summer camp in 1987. Soon, however, Endless Summer turns into a variation on Groundhog Day: the summer camp is a time loop, and the player’s job is to find a way out. As for the characters, their names are Runet in-jokes. The protagonist is Semyon Persunov, a Russification of the English “same person” used as an anonymous handle on early twenty-first-century Russian image boards, while the heroine, Alisa Dvachevskaya, is named after “Dvach,” or “2chan,” a Russian equivalent to the notorious 4chan.¹²

More striking are the game’s visuals, even though here, too, the aesthetic is more familiar than innovative. The visual novel is originally a Japanese form, with anime character designs. Endless Summer produces a delightful cognitive dissonance with Soviet realia surrounding Soviet characters drawn like the heroes of Japanese animation (the Pioneer scarf and uniform serving as an appropriate analog for anime’s ubiquitous Japanese school garb).¹³ Endless Summer handily encapsulates the appeal and the peril of the nostalgia that drives so much SovPunk: the summer camp is a nice place to spend some time, but it takes on a sinister overtone when the hero (and the player) realizes they’re stuck in a time loop. Granted, nearly all video games resemble a time loop for the player, since players keep coming back to play the same game again and again, at least until they manage to win. The time loop of Endless Summer is both a proxy for game play and a cautionary tale about nostalgia itself. We may want to (imaginatively, or even politically) visit the past, but to stay there is to admit defeat.

Stories of time loops have an intrinsic, puzzle-box appeal: what do I have to do differently in order to get out? But they are also an adventure-themed equivalent to the successful work of mourning: the mourner must grieve, even wallow, but only for a culturally specified duration (or, here, a given set of iterations of the loop). The longer one is trapped in the loop, the closer the player’s predicament resembles melancholia. The player is fixated on the past (here, literally fixated in it), incapable of moving forward. Even summers should not be endless.

Equally appropriate is the development of the two most anticipated SovPunk games to cash in on Endless Summer’s appeal: Mundfish Studio’s Atomic Heart and GM Reds’ visual novel SovietPunk: Nostalgia for the Present. SovietPunk takes place in a twenty-first-century USSR, populated by anime Komsomol girls who could have stepped right out of Endless Summer. GM Reds launched a very small but successful Kickstarter campaign in February 2021 to raise money for a demo, which, as of the summer of 2022, is available on Steam as the first part of the game, but there is no information available about the time frame for its full release. Atomic Heart, set in an alternate Soviet 1950s, made a splash when it dropped an action-packed, visually sophisticated trailer in May 2018, but anonymous reports of layoffs and strife may explain why, by 2022, even a demo version has yet to be seen. The endless anticipation for both games inadvertently recapitulates the temporality of the lost USSR itself, which continually deferred communism to a later date. Even in the world of video games, the radiant future rarely manifests as the radiant present.

When Atomic Heart did finally appear, the five years between the trailer and release did not do Mundfish Studios any favors. It came out on February 21, 2023, just three days short of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and two days before Russia’s Defenders of the Fatherland military holiday. While this could easily be an accident, the atmosphere in both countries does not exactly lend itself to the calm acceptance of coincidence. The developers have been excused of creating a love letter to the Soviet past, while the game’s defenders point out that the picture it portrays of an alternate 1950s is far from rosy. Had the game come out just two years earlier, it would have been simply one of many cultural productions that toy with Soviet nostalgia without completely committing to it. Instead, this game became something of a Time Crasher itself, launched into an era that no longer provided it with a reasonable pretense to neutrality. Is there anything more pathetic than a tale of an alternate timeline faltering because it is either untimely or too timely to be accepted at face value?

Welcome to Carbongrad

In its least ideological form, SovPunk comes to (still) life in Evgeny Zubkov’s series of online artwork known collectively as Carbongrad 1999 (rebranded as Russia 2077). Steeped in the aesthetic of Blade Runner-era cyberpunk, Carbongrad 1999 consists of clever variations on a single conceit: the seamless integration of Russian and Soviet everyday imagery into a gritty, urban high-tech landscape.

Visitors to Zubkov’s VKontakte and Instagram accounts are treated to photorealistic images of an old Russian woman in customary drab garb (ill-fitting sweater, gray skirt, flower-patterned headscarf) feeding flying robot drones as if they were birds, a middle-aged man in knee-high rubber boots carrying rusty buckets of water in each of his arms (including the two robotic ones sprouting from his back), and an orange-jacketed worker using a hose from his clunky water truck to clean off the graffiti from a giant, hovering mechanical sphere that looks like a mini-Death Star. Perhaps the most iconic of all the Carbongrad images is a bald, track-suited cyborg carrying a baseball bat studded with bolts and decorated with two stickers, one a robotic version of the woman holding a finger to her lips from the famous World War II “Don’t Blab!” poster, the other apparently the eponymous heroine of The Girl from the Future, both partially obscuring a warning familiar to anyone who has ever stood in front of a Russian subway door: “No Leaning!”

Zubkov’s combination of the cybernetic and quotidian is not, in itself, new; the artist himself freely acknowledges his debt to Simon Stalenhag, the Swedish artist known for his haunting paintings of retrofuturist machines set against the bucolic backdrop of his native countryside.¹⁴ Zubkov shares more than just Stalenhag’s aesthetic; equally important is how they both downplay the strangeness of their subject matter. Each artist engages in what Olga Meerson has called “re-familiarization” or “non-estrangement” (neostranenie), the process of describing something new and odd as if we were expected already to know all about it.

Zubkov’s art casually asserts an important point about Russia’s future: namely, that Russia has one. True, Zubkov describes his imaginary world as an “alternate present,” but what makes it alternate are the futuristic elements that share space with familiar Russian realia. This combination of Russia and (retro)futurism might well be understood by analogy to the largely anglophone movement known as Afrofuturism. At its most basic, Afrofuturism pushes against the overwhelming whiteness of most twentieth-century science fiction simply by depicting a future that, at a minimum, has Black people in it, and, more boldly, moves Blackness from the background to prominence.

It is this minimum that Zubkov achieves in Carbongrad 1999. Unlike the more militant SovPunk discussed below, Zubkov’s deployment of Russian and Soviet signifiers is unaccompanied by patriotic bluster. He achieves this understated “Russofuturism” by avoiding the most obvious signs of Russian statehood and national pride, creating an imaginary geography that is maximally distant from the sites of empire. If we had to place Carbongrad somewhere on the maps of Russia, it would be deep in the North. Russia outside the capitals can be romanticized, and certainly has been by blood-and-soil traditionalists, but the conservatives’ chosen setting is usually the countryside. Zubkov’s world is both provincial and urban, located firmly within the modern world yet far from the traditional loci of significance in Russia.¹⁵ Zubkov’s imaginary Russia is a palimpsest in which the past, present, and future overlie each other. Unlike DSDS’s “2045” video, it seems indifferent to questions of Russia’s destiny and unwilling to police the boundaries of the Russian cultural imagination. His futuristic Russia comfortably fits within the current maps of the country. Far from being expansionist, it retreats to the Russian heartland. William Gibson, one of the fathers of cyberpunk, famously asserted that “the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” Carbongrad is a gentle, optimistic rebuttal: the future will make it even to the Russian provinces.

Zubkov paints a set of worlds that can comfortably domesticate any external influence without making a fuss, even Western pop action heroes. In the Northern Spider series, Spider-Man is reimagined as a resident of an unnamed Russian provincial city. His costume retains the familiar red and black color scheme but appears to be made of more realistic components, cobbled together from clothing that might conceivably be available to an ordinary person. There is no need to give this version of Spider-Man any particularly Russian stylistic attributes (no two-headed eagles or Russian flags); he is Russified simply by his inclusion in an environment that is clearly far from Queens. In one picture he shoots webs at a monstrous mecha-truck as a babushka looks on, a grocery bag in each hand. Another shows what looks to be the Russian Peter Parker’s bedroom, complete with a cobweb made out of his webbing, a turn-of-the-century computer displaying a newspaper story about his first appearance that shows the Northern spider in an homage to the iconic cover of the first Spider-Man story, and a newspaper clipping suggesting that the Northern Spider got his powers during a school trip to a nuclear power plant.

Zubkov works the same sort of magic in his Russian Turtles picture, which announces itself (in English) as “An alternative universe in which 4 mutated turtles were born in Russia in the mad 90s.” Leonardo now carries an AK-47, Donatello sports a Sputnik tattoo, Michelangelo is holding a shawarma in a pose suggesting either a weapon or his next meal, and all of them are wearing sneakers and ski masks. Instead of their customary sewer, the Turtles seem to have made their home base in a junk yard. Situating the Turtles in the Russian 1990s is a clever choice, and not just because most of the original cartoon aired in that decade. The original Turtles’ scrappy, DIY aesthetic, along with their status as muscle-bound brawlers, makes it easy to imagine them in the messy world of Russian gangsters and general instability.

The artist’s casual incorporation of future tech and Russian reality, not to mention foreign popular culture, is a relaxed, optimistic alternative to both alternate history and future history. For Russia to persist in the future, or for the future to make its way into present-day Russia, not a great deal has to change. “Russianness” (as depicted in everyday realia) is neither extolled nor condemned; the persistence of visibly Russian tropes in an imagined future could be seen as a gesture toward a cyclical, determinist model of the nation’s history, suggesting that Russia will not and cannot ever change. But the lived-in feeling of Zubkov’s work points in a different direction: Russia can make its way into the future while still remaining visibly Russian. There is nothing to fear from new technology, just as there is nothing to fear from the influx of Western animated turtles and web-slinging teens. Russia can absorb the new without losing itself.

Soviet Space: The Final Frontier

The most sustained effort at imagining a post-post-Soviet future for Russia is the USSR-2061 project, which I have referred to a few times in previous sections. Started by two young men on LiveJournal who go by the handles Archy13 and Felix, the USSR-2061 project was a reaction to the unrelenting pessimism its founders saw in then-contemporary science fiction; in one of their videos, they note that the year 2011, when they began the project, was dominated by zombies in film and video games, as well as talk about the Mayan calendar’s alleged prediction that the world would end in 2012 (SSSR-2061, “Divannaia futurologiia”). As an inspiration for a more optimistic approach, they looked to the past: 2011 was the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering space flight. So they decided to fantasize about what life would be like on the hundredth anniversary, in a future where the Soviet Union had at some point been restored.

Thus began an annual tradition: the announcement of a contest for best contributions on a given theme in a given format. Most of the competitions, including the inaugural one, were for artwork. The theme was not just a Soviet future, or even a Soviet future in space, but artistic works that supported the project’s tag line: “a future that you want to live to see” (do kotorogo khochetsia dozhit’). The first competition was devoted to the colonization of Mars, the second to the asteroid belt, followed by a contest to imagine the UAZ truck of the future, a competition commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the hit science fiction film The Girl from the Future, and contests for designing Martian robots and imagining what vacations would be like in fifty years’ time. They also conducted two short-story competitions, which garnered hundreds of entries. The second competition was paid for by a very successful crowd-funding campaign on Boomstarter, with the winning entries collected in a book published by EKSMO (one of the biggest Russian publishers). The rest of the stories are available online in eleven volumes of e-books.¹⁶

Archy13 and Felix found the art easier to judge, because it was less time-consuming than reading hundreds of stories. The results, however, are not particularly memorable. Ironically, a project whose founders have repeatedly insisted on their lack of interest in retrofuturism has yielded an astonishing amount of backward-looking art (particularly in comparison to Carbongrad). The general aesthetic is a combination of Soviet propaganda posters, American Golden Age science fiction cover art, video games, and anime. So we have square-jawed cosmonauts, spaceships with Soviet symbols, girls whose outfits somehow combine the Komsomol and Japanese schoolgirl garb, serious people looking up at the sky, and robots. Lots and lots of robots.

Indeed, despite the video game influence, the robots remind us that most of this art was made as if cyberpunk never happened. USSR-2061 is analog through and through, even though it is all created on computers and shared over social media. Even in the fiction, most of the technology involves heavy machinery and space travel. Some of this is dictated by the contests’ themes, but the consistency with which the virtual and digital are ignored is worth considering. While Archy13 and Felix are adamant that they are not interested in alternate history, and that therefore the Soviet Union has to have collapsed in 1991 as part of the fictional background, USSR-2061 remains rooted in 1961: this is a future that is less the continuation of our world than the sequel to the golden age of the Soviet space program. The result is a vision that could be more nostalgic only if it had Soviet music constantly playing in the background.

The stories and art of USSR-2061 remind us of the huge symbolic significance held by the space program, to an extent that NASA never matched. The Soviets were the first in space, both with Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin in 1961. As a response, John F. Kennedy famously committed the United States’ resources to putting a man on the moon, an event that held the attention of the entire world. But soon NASA’s launches lost their luster (tedium punctuated only by horrible tragedies, such as the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion). Going to the moon the first time was romantic; going for the third was routine. And eventually the pictures sent back from rockets and space shuttles paled in comparison to science fiction films, thanks to the huge strides made in special effects and computer graphics in the 1970s and 1980s. But NASA’s declining prestige was also the result of choices made by the government, choices that involved not just finances but public relations.

After the 1960s, the US government made little effort to excite its citizens about the space program, while the Soviet Union never stopped using Gagarin as a point of pride. The Soviet space program was the logical evolution of the USSR’s decades-long romance with science and flight. Under Stalin, aviators were national heroes; the pilots who seemed to defy the laws of gravity exemplified the Soviet progressive ethos. With the space program, the Soviet Union could lay claim not just to scientific progress but to the broader universe and, by extension, the future. If, as the Stalin-era song puts it, Soviet citizens were born to “turn fairy tales into real life,” then the space program would do the same for science fiction.

Gagarin remained a national hero long after his flight into space. Even in the last Soviet years, his image was on posters and postage stamps, and people still told jokes playing off the famous word he said before takeoff, Poekhali (“Let’s go!” or “We’re off!”). Though undoubtedly the product of numerous political decisions and motivated at least in part by a desire to show the rest of the world how powerful Soviet science was, the space program, along with the Soviet victory over the Nazis, was one of the few national accomplishments of which everyone was proud, regardless of political convictions. Cosmonauts were heroes, pure and simple.

After the Soviet collapse, the space program fell on hard times. Disconnected both from everyday reality and the priorities of the new Russian state, the Soviet cosmonauts were the leftovers of a vanished world. Veteran cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Alexander Volkov were on the Mir space station when the Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 26, 1991. Their return was postponed because the Baikonur landing area was located in the now independent country of Kazakhstan. This odd story earned Krikalev the sobriquet of the “Last Soviet Citizen.” Krikalev had already been on the station long before Volkov arrived; when they finally landed, Krikalev had spent twice as much time in space as originally planned, and time dilation meant that he was now .02 seconds younger than everyone who had been born on Earth at the same time as he was. Once a harbinger of the future, the cosmonaut had become a man who was literally from another country and another time.

It is fitting, then, that the imaginary relaunch of the Soviet Union be predicated on multiple rocket launches into space. The entries submitted to the contest varied in their prehistories of the new USSR, and even in their geography. Sometimes the USSR was reborn within its old borders, sometimes on a smaller scale, and sometimes as a global empire. But these geographies turn out to matter far less than the infinite scale afforded by space. As one entry to the competition puts it, “The history of the space fleet is inextricably linked to the history of the USSR” (Prudnikov). It’s not simply a matter of colonization, though that definitely plays a role (and since the time of Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 novel Red Star, who can resist the chance to turn Mars communist?).¹⁷ The symbolic geography of the Soviet Union always had a strong vertical component, from the aforementioned aviators to the cosmonauts. The contest’s conditions reversed the temporality of Soviet history (or at least the history of the original Soviet Union). Now, the Soviet Union 2.0 arises on Earth as a function of the demand to describe Soviet outer space. The Soviet Union was always as much an idea as a place, and now, in its resurrection, the idea (and the ideal) comes first. Nostalgia for the USSR tends to involve a desire for a return to “greatness”; USSR-2061 starts with greatness and builds from there. By choosing the space program as a point of departure, USSR-2061 develops a model of revanchist greatness that is considerably less hysterical than the much more prominent alternative: the countless stories returning to or reenacting World War II discussed in previous chapters.

Space Begins at Home

By making space exploration the theme of the first competition and following it up with a mix of technological topics (the asteroid belt, cars) and more general ones (vacation in the future), Archy13 and Felix implicitly encouraged a dual approach to science fiction. The trappings of hard science fiction were meant to be combined with what the organizers call “social science fiction” (sotsial’naia fantastika). The result was often two competing info dumps in a single story: one about technological advances; the other providing sociohistorical background, usually with a distinct ideological tinge.

While Archy13 and Felix’s project is obviously based on disenchantment with the current order, their own statements are never particularly strident. Even their guidelines for imagining a future USSR are rather moderate, both sociologically and technologically. There will be no faster-than-light travel, no aliens, no singularity but also no collapse of the United States or global conquest by the new USSR. Nonetheless, many of the contestants looked at the competition as an argument to elaborate their thoughts on geopolitics and ideology. It is no surprise that the winning stories were published in a volume that would become part of EKSMO’s series of “patriotic” science fiction, much of which was produced by writers associated with the liberpunk movement (see my Plots against Russia 169–77). Liberpunk is a Russian science fiction subgenre whose prime subject matter is liberalism as a dystopia. USSR-2016 is not a liberpunk project, but it functions as a kinder, gentler fellow traveler.

Thus in Olga Bondareva’s USSR-2061 story, “The Glass Dream,” we learn that “the black population in the USA” continues to protest, even after the passage of the 2038 Political Correctness Law, which affirms the concepts of “Afro-American,” “Euro-American,” and “Asian American.” America is even worse in Yuri Khabibulin’s entry, “Mother’s Day.” Since 2025, the United States has been the last country in the world to be ruled by “secret state feminism.” At an international women’s conference, the US representative bursts with pride at her country’s rising abortion rates, the laws restricting the rights of “aggressive and stupid” men, and the successful propaganda in favor of lesbianism, whose goal is to reduce men to “slaves and subhumans.”

In his USSR-2061 story, “Red Means Blood,” Pyotr Nazinov’s protagonist laments the plight of capitalists in the West, who are “surrounded by cruelty, perversions, and pettiness.” The West, he explains, “hates us, because they are afraid. We hate them because they hate us. They’ve always hated us. Always, throughout history they’ve exploited and deceived us.” The West’s treachery is a recurrent theme. In Miloslav Kniazev’s “Fifth Medal,” we learn that Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan passed national referenda to restore the USSR, after which they were immediately attacked by “the fascist countries of NATO.” It is not enough that the USSR be ideal; the West has to be on the decline. As Yana Talyaka writes in “Not a Word of Lies”: “Now the Soviet does not look abroad to the promised land; it is the foreigner who looks to the USSR.” In another story, Sergei Tolstoi’s “The New Person,” the USSR’s growth rate is so high that the decision to reform the USSR in 2022 was undeniably correct: “The only way the Western world could stop the USSR and keep its hegemony was through war.” What else could be expected from the United States and its allies? As volume 9 of the series, “The Little Earth” by Aleksei Savvin, puts it, “The USA is run not by its government, but by secret financial clans, and they hold hostage not just the Americans, but the entire world.”

Still, the expansion into outer space does allow some of the writers to think more expansively about how a future USSR might create a radiant future that manages not to be totalitarian. Most of the wars that the various future Soviet Unions wage are wars of defense, rather than choice; the USSR tends to win over hearts and minds through soft power and an appealing example. In Andrei Khval’skii’s “Summer Internship,” which is a futuristic pastiche of a familiar revolutionary story, Commander Chapaev tells the faithful Petka that the USSR is not for everyone: “our scientists think that there are so-called ‘genetic liberals’ for whom what we would consider an unacceptable environment is natural to them, like the swamp to a swamp creature.” The new USSR takes these poor, benighted souls into account (“We’re not fascists, Petka!”). It signed the “Oslo Accord on the Rights of Psychos and Their Individual Psychic Climates” and has pledged to take care of these liberals while making sure they don’t start an “epidemic of mental illness.”

Talyaka’s “Not a Word of Lies” also emphasizes the USSR’s voluntary character: “We don’t keep anyone if they don’t like it. Compensate the state for your education, medical care, and everything else it’s spent on you, and you’re off. Try your luck. What’s important is that the Soviet Union has not made foreign countries into forbidden fruit.” Tolstoi’s “New Person” uses virtually the same language: “the Soviet person may freely choose to live in communism, socialism, or try his luck in a market environment.”

Sim Socialism

The element of choice is important when we remember that these stories are not merely descriptive of an imaginary future; they are describing “the future you want to live to see.” Like the twenty-first-century Soviet citizens, readers, too, are implicitly choosing their own path. It just so happens that the Soviet path is always the better one. More often than not, the new Soviet Union arises from the will of the people or from international agreements among former Soviet republics. The contributors to USSR-2061 apparently share the widespread Russian antipathy to revolution.

Taken together, the stories offer a significant revision of Marxist theory in sci-fi form. Instead of the workers coming to consciousness and starting a revolution, the inhabitants of Russia in the future, as well as readers today, come to consciousness in order not to start a revolution but to build communism through consensus.

An early contribution by Villy9, called “The Decision,” brings this point home through a plotline that starts as clever metafiction but ends with all the subtlety of a bulldozer. The year is, of course, 2061, and an expert on our time (the second decade of the twenty-first century) is called into an experimental physics lab for his advice. Soviet scientists have opened a portal to another dimension, where it is 2010 and the Soviet Union has collapsed: “The problem is that on their Earth only one path for development remains: capitalism.” This other world is so hopeless that it “has no future.” Even the residents’ imagination is stunted: “A large part of their creative output is probably devoted to the coming apocalypse.” Yes, reader, this is our world.

Fortunately, the scientists and the historian realize that all they need to do is somehow communicate to their counterparts (that is, to us), that change is possible, and it is up to them: “We’ll give them the idea for a small literary competition. Or an art competition. We’ll call it … how about, USSR-2112.” The rest, as they say, is (alternate) history.

It’s a clumsy story, and the point it is making is rather obvious. But if we stretch its metafictional parameters a bit further than was their likely intent, “The Decision” reveals something important about the competition’s ideology and genre. These stories are meant to have the effect that all good utopian fiction strives for: to convert the reader to the cause. What emerges is the inverse of Marxism. Marx’s “scientific” conceit was to put utopia at the end of a set of predictable, understandable historical processes, while pre- and non-Marxist utopian thought tended to presume that a perfect world could be built anywhere, as long as its founders and residents tried hard enough. The Soviet Union always had a strong voluntarist strain, especially under Stalin: industrial output was supposed to increase as a matter of will. But there remained at least the fig leaf of a historical theory and systematic thought. USSR-2061 conjures a communist future by returning to the utopian roots that Marx so despised. There is no need for a revolution, nor is there really much point to figuring out how a better future is to be realized. It will be built repeatedly, and almost effortlessly, on the Internet, in a kind of graphomaniacal slacktivism.

Examining all these post-Soviet futures, from the post-apocalyptic wastelands to the empires to the revived USSR, yields a result that would probably surprise Westerners more than Russians. Compared to all the other scenarios, the future USSR is about the triumph of optimism. Let the imperial and postnuclear futures dabble in Stalinism and state violence; the Soviet future is about Soviet-style contentment. That is to say, for many readers and netizens, the imaginary Soviet Union is their happy place.

And because it exists solely in the realm of the imagination, this USSR is collectivist in form but individual in content. Each post-Soviet dreamer is free to keep what they like and ignore the USSR’s more problematic features (indeed, even to deny these features’ very reality). USSR-2061’s anthology format is the perfect embodiment of this dynamic: it consists of several collections of independently conceived Soviet futures that cannot be consistent with each other in the details while still manifesting a shared desire for something that is different in all the authors’ minds while sharing the same name and premise.

All of this begs the question: how do we look at SovPunk now that the Russian Federation has been committing war crimes in Ukraine? Is it yet another in a long list of examples of Russian cultural figures’ willful ignorance of both Soviet and Russian imperialism? Or worse, another weapon in the Russian imperialist arsenal, part of the assumptions of cultural “greatness” used to justify Russian hegemony? In the spirit of academic wishy-washiness, my answer is: yes and no. The case of the USSR-2061 project is rather clear. Everything about the contests and their results is based on unexamined nostalgic assumptions about a Soviet Union that was multinational rather than imperial. USSR-2061 exports Soviet and Russian notions of greatness to outer space, thanks to the importance that the space program played in the Soviet national consciousness. While it is meant to be a futurist projection of 1961, it also inadvertently recapitulates 1921, when Yevgeny Zamyatin finished his dystopian novel, We. The narrator of We writes his journal in response to the state’s call for widespread cultural production to be included in the rocket that is about to be sent into outer space; somehow, these works spread the state’s ideology to the stars. The flaws in this mission reflect the flaws of the state, particularly its inability to effectively conceive of difference and individuality (how, after all, are these aliens supposed to read texts in a language for which they have no frame of reference)? The USSR-2061 project exemplifies the totalizing narcissism that Zamyatin so effectively critiques.

I want to hold out a little hope for the less threatening varieties of SovPunk, such as Carbongrad 1999. Carbongrad is unaggressive and humorous, and it does not have to be deployed in the service of an imperial idea. But I have my doubts on such imagery’s resistance to appropriation by more belligerent forces. I have yet to see images of Russian soldiers in Ukraine with tattoos of Zubkov’s baseball-wielding cyborg. But I would not be surprised if I found one.

1. Kirill Kobrin argues that Russians’ “social atomization” and indifference to politics means that “Russian society has a weak sense of the reality of any other order besides their own personal worries.” As a result, they have nothing from which they could construct an image of the future (15).

2. See the contributions to Orsi’s volume for some of the most salient critiques of Huntington.

3. Suslov notes that some Russian science fiction writers “inspired by the ideology of Eurasianism and Samuel Huntington’s theorization … reduce their plotlines to clashes of civilizations” (575).

4. Hard, but not impossible. Marina Aptekman finds in Boris Sokolov a quotation by “the leader of the Union of Orthodox Oprichniks, Iosif Volotskii … : Finally Vladimir Sorokin has written a very good book. It will show everyone how we should treat the enemies of Russia” (“Old New Russian,” 283).

5. On the connection between the two books, see Aptekman, “Forward to the Past.”

6. Short for “agitation and propaganda,” agitprop is a term that dates back to the early Soviet days, referring to the use of popular media to make the case for communism.

7. So much so that ironic positivity becomes the stuff of subcultures, like the “Brony” phenomenon, in which adult men profess to be avid fans of My Little Pony.

8. Here I am following Lisa Hayden’s lead (“Big Wheel Effect”) in my translation of this title. Oposredovanno first appeared in the journal Volga in 2018, before being published by the prestigious Redaktsiia Elena Shubinoi as a separate book the following year.

9. Or maybe not so heroic. I have been unable to access the complete gallery of Red Cape memes included on siesit siesit’s page; my Internet provider classifies the website as malware. Fortunately, the Red Cape has a VKontakte page (with only four members, including siesit siesit). It seems likely that whoever siesit siesit is, he is also the author of the Red Cape, talking about his creation as if he were merely a critic (as Nadya Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Samutsevitch did when they first gave a public lecture about Pussy Riot before the group ever appeared in public).

10. DC Comics did publish the adventures of the gas-mask wearing Sandman in the 1940s, but he was meant to look intimidating.

11. “Alternate timeline” is an inadequate designation, since the Red Alert series, with its multiple endings, changing geographic and temporal settings, and convoluted connections to the larger Command & Conquer franchise, has become a multiverse of its own.

12. She is modeled on the anime-inspired mascot for 2chan, Dvach-chan. The mascot was conceived on the same image board that gave birth to Endless Summer, Ychan.

13. The original release also included erotic content in the manner of the eroge (Japanese erotic video games), but the game was cleaned up for its release on Steam.

14. Stalenhag is probably best known for Tales from the Loop, a narrative art book that inspired a science fiction series on Amazon Prime in 2020.

15. Here I am obviously influenced by Anne Lounsbery’s brilliant Life Is Elsewhere.

16. None of these e-books have any publishing information included in their files, including editors or date of publication. They may have been produced by the competition’s directors, or they may have been released by a third party.

17. From Timur Suvorkin’s “Pioneer Means First”: “When America was the first on the moon, that hurt. But that defeat meant one thing: challenge accepted. Mars would have to become Soviet.”