While You Were Sleeping

After the leaders of the Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian Soviet Social Republics signed the USSR’s death certificate (otherwise known as the Belovezha Accords), Komsomol’skaia pravda, the venerable central youth newspaper that was already well on its way to becoming a tabloid, published a cleverly titled obituary: “Ia prosnulsia—zdras’te! Net sovetskoi vlasti!”¹ In English, that would be, “I woke up and—hello! Soviet power is gone!,” but the original Russian is a catchy rhyme. It dates back to a popular saying from the 1960s, referring, among other things, to crossing the border into Poland by night train. Before 1991, it was merely ironic, or perhaps wishful thinking, but now it summed up the strangeness of the USSR’s death by pen stroke.²

The appeal of the Rip Van Winkle time travel trope after 1991 is undeniable: the entire country fell asleep, only to wake up to a different world. Where Soviet citizens once marched forward into the future, now they found themselves sleeping through history. The key question though, is not how they slept but rather how they felt, and what they did, when they woke up. Where some were ecstatic, others hoped they were simply having a bad dream. Or wished they could go back to sleep until things changed again.

This metaphorical time travel is probably the only kind that does not defy the laws of conventional physics, since the technical passage of time is unaltered. It is a variation on future shock, except that the unease has nothing to do with developments in technology. Instead, the idea of either waking up in a new world or doggedly refusing to do so keeps the Soviet order alive through sheer force of will.

The common tropes surrounding the end of communism are primarily about motion. An obstacle to be removed, communism “fell” or “collapsed,” as illustrated by two recurring images: people marching in the streets (forward motion) or statues toppled from their pedestals (downward motion). This was supposed to be the march of history, with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall as the visual representation of people’s refusal to be stopped or contained. The Soviet Union’s end was anticlimactic, but it was preceded by two unprecedentedly kinetic years.

To keep the Soviet Union alive, then, was anti-kinetic, a concerted effort to remain inert. One of America’s most rabid anticommunists, William F. Buckley Jr., inaugurated his National Review in 1955 with a mission statement that the magazine would “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” Ironically, this is not a bad description of the imaginary Soviet Union in the years immediately following 1991, but with an important change of position. The people remaining in imaginary communism after its fall would be taking things lying down.

When a country confronts malaise and even, possibly, termination, metaphors of morbidity and mortality are not far behind. In the run-up to the Crimean War (the nineteenth-century one, not its twenty-first-century echo), the Ottoman Empire was diagnosed as the “sick man of Europe,” supposedly by Tsar Nicholas I, although the attribution remains debatable (Livianos 299–300). In the century and a half that followed, the rest of the continent’s constituent parts have unwillingly vied for that (dis)honor, with the term applied to Serbia in 1997 (O’Rourke), Germany after reunification (Dustman), Italy on more than one occasion (Mammone and Vetri), Portugal in 2007 (“New Sick Man”), Greece after the 2008 financial crisis (Carassava), Scotland (McCartney), the United Kingdom (Buttonwood), and post-Soviet Russia (Eberstadt) repeatedly over the past three decades.

Toward the end of the Cold War, the gerontocracies of the Warsaw Pact succeeded in making the metaphor of the failing country as a sick man literal, with Brezhnev’s failing faculties, incomprehensible diction, and moribund bearing setting the tone. At the time, the aging of the leadership did not inspire much hope for significant change, let alone far-fetched fantasies of total regime collapse. After Brezhnev’s demise, his replacement by two old men who died in rapid succession appeared to make geriatric leadership death an ongoing feature of Soviet life. When Konstantin Chernenko became the third general secretary to die in four years, a popular joke made the rounds about someone being asked for his ticket to Chernenko’s funeral and replying, “I have a subscription.”

The actual death of the Soviet Union took place after six years of intense dynamism rather than quasi-vegetative stagnation. The drama and trauma of the old system’s passing would sometimes find itself embodied in the figure of the dying elder who lies in bed and slowly recedes from life while the outside world moves forward at breakneck speed. That contrast has long been at the center of stories that focus on the experience of the bedridden dying, from Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilich (1886), who is outraged that the world will continue without him, to the protagonist of Yuri Olesha’s 1928 “Liompa,” who despairs that he is slowly forgetting the names of all the objects and creatures that will remain after he is gone. One year before “Liompa,” and just ten years after the October Revolution, Olesha published his short novel Envy, whose protagonist and initial narrator, like Olesha himself, was born in 1899. At one point, the narrator, Nikolai Kavalerov, writes:

“My youth coincided with the youth of the era,” I say …

“I often think about our era. Our era is renowned. Isn’t it marvelous when the youth of an era [molodost’ veka] and the youth of a man [molodost’ cheloveka] coincide.” (26)

Technically, Kavalerov could have lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one or ninety-two and seen that same era’s passing, although his drinking habits and dissolute lifestyle combined with the ravages of Soviet history make this scenario unlikely. The novel ends with its hero in bed, and it is not difficult to imagine him back there again, dying along with the Soviet Union.

Have a Nice Funeral

In any case, Olesha died in 1960, and so he never had the chance to bring his horizontal hero to a post-Soviet resting place. That task would fall to others. One of the earlier examples is Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s short novel The Funeral Party (1997), which complicates matters by taking place in New York rather than the former Soviet Union. The Funeral Party is about the last days of Alik, a Soviet émigré painter dying in his tiny New York apartment. Most of the narrative attention is devoted to the women attending to him—former and current lovers, neighbors, and one quasi-stepdaughter. All of them except the neighbor are immigrants from the USSR, a country that, for them, has long been in a twilight state between life and death.

Since the early days of the USSR, emigration has been associated with notions of living death. The White émigrés of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Flight (1927) may as well be living in a squalid version of the Tibetan Bardo; the heroine of Olesha’s A List of Blessings (1931) is an actress whose flirtation with emigration is redeemed in the end only by a heroic, pro-Soviet martyrdom. In 1986, Soviet television aired “The Russians Are Here,” a 1983 episode of the American documentary television series Frontline; this was a profile of Russian émigrés in New York, which the Soviets broadcast under the title Byvshie (former people), continuing the tradition of portraying emigration as a hellish afterlife.

Ulitskaya’s ex-Soviet heroes, by contrast, are doing rather well. Alik and his fellow émigrés have spent years in the United States; “even their bodies changed their composition: the molecules of the New World entered their blood and replaced everything old from home” (90). The land of their birth “existed for them only in their dreams” (90–91). If their sense of self depended on Russia, it was primarily through negation, as “proof of the correctness” of their decision to leave: “Consciously or not, the news from Moscow about the growing stupidity, lack of talent and criminality of life there during these years provided the proof they needed. But none could have imagined that what was happening in that far-off place which they had all but erased from their lives would be so painful for them now. It turned out that this country sat in their souls, their guts, and that whatever they thought about it—and they all thought different things—their links with it were unbreakable” (90).

All the same, Alik, at least, has kept close track of events in the Soviet Union. At the outbreak of the August Coup in 1991, he gloats, “I said something would happen before that treaty was signed,” to which a new visitor from Moscow asks, “What treaty?” (86–87).³

The Funeral Party is decidedly not about the fate of Russia; instead, it is a showcase for Ulitskaya’s ability to create groups of characters who feel individual and real rather than symbolic or abstract. Nonetheless, she structures the eleventh chapter around the coup; as soon as it is over (in chapter 13), Alik’s decline accelerates. He watches the statues being torn down and the public funeral of the three men who died in the fighting, and he starts to confuse the crowds on the television with the crowd of people outside his window. He speaks briefly only five more times before lapsing into unconsciousness and, eventually, death.

Alik does not live to witness the Soviet Union’s official demise, but he does keep his wits about him long enough to see the most dramatic events that led to his homeland’s end. Again, The Funeral Party is far more concerned with its characters as people than as allegorical figures, but the parallels between Alik’s last days and the rapid decline of the USSR are easy to see. Each is shocking and (with the benefit of hindsight) inevitable, and each remains somewhat inexplicable. Alik’s illness never gets a proper diagnosis, but he dies of a creeping paralysis that eventually stops his lungs and his heart. In life, Alik had been joyful, creative, and irrepressible, a man who, the narrator tells us, was capable of being at home just about anywhere. In The Funeral Party, Ulitskaya bids farewell not just to an individual man (who is the object of love and mourning) or even a country (which, at least here, is not) but to a relationship between the two. Despite the occasional talk of souls, this is not a metaphysical or primordial tie as much as it is about the inextricable links between personal and national history. It is the story of an ordinary man’s unasked-for connection to the country of his birth. For the émigré such as Alik, it was always there, leading a parallel life. And now it was dying along with him.

Goodbye, Brezhnev!, or, The Lenin Who Couldn’t Die

Ulitskaya was not alone in linking the slow death of an aging character with the decline and fall of late socialism. But Alik, despite his emotional attachment to Russian culture, had little in the way of a lingering investment in the Soviet system. Two much more famous works would find greater drama and comedy in the symbiotic connection between a bedridden elder and a vanished Second World: Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye, Lenin! and Olga Slavnikova’s 2001 novel The Man Who Couldn’t Die. The shared general conceit (a family’s attempt to pretend that their socialist country never collapsed out of fear that the shock would kill their ailing parent/spouse) is a sore point for Slavnikova, who has publicly insisted that Becker stole her idea (“Slavnikova v Chekhovke”). Even if her accusation is unfounded, the coincidence is unfortunate, since to the broader, non-Russophone world it puts Slavnikova in the position of the person who wrote a book “like Goodbye, Lenin!,” although she published it two years earlier.⁴

Slavnikova’s frustration is understandable. Her original idea ends up looking second-hand. Even worse, The Man Who Couldn’t Die is unlikely ever to reach the popularity of Goodbye, Lenin!. Nor is it likely to be filmed, and not only because Becker’s movie will always stand in the way. Slavnikova’s novel is, like much of her work, far more concerned with her characters’ inner worlds than anything else. Even though The Man Who Couldn’t Die does have plotlines that go beyond the characters (a local election is at the heart of the story), the book pays much more attention to what is going on in the paralyzed old Alexei Afanasievich’s bed and in his wife’s and stepdaughter’s heads. To add insult to injury, a German work and a Russian work use the same conceit, but it is in Germany—Germany!—that the results are funny.

For what it’s worth, I find Mark Lipovetsky’s assessment of the situation convincing: “The metaphor juxtaposing physical immobility and being stuck in the past and/or awakening in a different country was too obvious to anybody living through the postsocialist transition not to become a common trope” (“Introduction,” x). As I hope the previous chapters already show, the post-Soviet imagination has produced a plethora of stories involving sudden time jumps and, as we will soon see, thriving twenty-first-century Soviet Unions. If we add in the late- and post-Soviet preoccupation with simulation and the unavoidable figure of Lenin slumbering in his tomb, the conceit of both works does start to look inevitable.

Goodbye, Lenin!, of course, is broadly postsocialist rather than specifically post-Soviet; it is a German film whose action takes place almost entirely in (the former) East Berlin. The film has the iconographic advantage of its Cold War border setting, with the Berlin Wall having divided the socialist East from the capitalist West. The Soviet Union is decentered, if not absent: where the protagonist’s father abandoned his family and married a West German years ago, young Alex is in love with Lara, a Soviet nurse in the hospital that treats his mother, Christiane. Alex’s sister, meanwhile, follows in her father’s footsteps by getting involved with a West German man, with the crucial difference that these footsteps are far fewer: in her case, the West has come to her. The romantic entanglements of Goodbye, Lenin! are one of the many things that show how crucial the setting is in each of the two stories, even if the now defunct political system was more or less the same. Germany has plenty of cities, but Goodbye, Lenin! is set in East Berlin, not only to exploit the drama of the Berlin Wall but to highlight the effect that proximity had always had. The West was accessible and relatively familiar in a way that could not possibly have been true for Slavnikova’s characters, who make their home in the Urals. If they live in Slavnikova’s native Yekaterinburg, their (internal) border is with Siberia—how much farther could they be?⁵

The story of Goodbye Lenin! is straightforward: Christiane, a schoolteacher and apparent true believer in East Germany’s communist path, sees her son Alex embroiled in a scuffle with police at a demonstration by the Wall. She has a heart attack and falls into a coma that lasts eight months. During that time, the Berlin Wall comes down; Alex’s sister, Ariane, leaves school to work at a Burger King and invites her new, West German boyfriend to move in with them; Alex takes a job installing satellite dishes and starts a romance with Lara, his mother’s nurse from the Soviet Union. When Christiane finally wakes up, the doctors warn her children that any shock to her system might be fatal. Roping in his unwilling sister, and with the help of his tech-savvy friend Denis, Alex recreates socialist East Germany within the confines of their apartment. They replace their new furniture with the older items they had put in storage, and Alex is on the constant hunt for some of his mother’s favorite foods that are no longer sold. He and Denis even create fake news broadcasts that his mother watches on her TV and a hidden VCR.

When Christiane regains some of her strength, she leaves the apartment to discover foreign cars, advertising billboards, and even a statue of Lenin being towed off into the distance by a helicopter. Her children quickly concoct a new lie: West Germans, fed up with the predations of capitalism, are coming to the East in droves.

Not long before her death, Christiane reveals that she had been supposed to bring the family and rejoin their father in the West after his escape but had changed her mind out of fear that the state might seize her children. She asks to see her former husband one last time, a brief, personal reunification that Alex facilitates. In anticipation of the upcoming national reunification celebrations, Alex and Denis invent one last outrageous news story about the new East German leader’s opening of the borders with the West. Unbeknownst to them, Lara has told her the truth about the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Christiane dies a few days later.

The challenges involved in recreating the socialism of a bygone era (even one that ended mere months ago) provide Goodbye, Lenin! with both comedy and pathos: Alex and Denis’s film shoots for their fake news programs are delightfully absurd, even going as far as convincing a taxi driver who resembles East Germany’s most famous cosmonaut to imitate his lookalike and pretend to be the nonexistent country’s new head of state. All their efforts are ultimately doomed because this quixotic rescue mission is not merely out of step with the surroundings: it is anti-entropic. It requires the enforced, falsified order of a closed system (the apartment) that is nonetheless fatally vulnerable to the chaotic outside world. Even Lara’s revelation of the truth to Christiane is not just a matter of ethics—it is the final proof that one cannot stop information from leaking or control all variables. Out of love for his mother, Alex is trying to create a self-contained world that cannot allow any contradictory information to seep in from the outside world. In doing so, he is not just re-creating the material trappings of East Germany but also mimicking its oppressive and restrictive structure. Their apartment is made of four Berlin Walls.

In physics, the idea of a struggle against entropy is senseless, since it would involve the movement of energy, which, by definition, increases entropy. But entropy is also a question of time: each moves in only one direction. Warmhearted as the film is, Goodbye, Lenin! reminds its viewers that nostalgia’s fatal flaw is its unwillingness to reconcile with the passage of time. This is all the more poignant because the nostalgia in this case is secondhand; Christiane does not know that she is living in a simulation, and Alex is interested in preserving the illusion of a persistent East Germany only to hang onto his childhood and, more important, his mother. Once again, the attachment to the lost world is melancholic, although in Alex’s case, it is more a matter of anticipatory mourning for his mother’s impending death. It is only through his mother’s eyes that Alex can vicariously feel any sense of loss at East Germany’s passing.

Yet, as I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Christiane’s static journey to the grave is counterbalanced by other instances of symbolic motion. First, there is her collapse at the protest that marks the beginning of her illness (she falls not long before both the Wall and her beloved regime do). Second is the movement back and forth across the no longer meaningful border between East and West Germany. In the fantasy world constructed by her son, the mad rush of East Germans into the West becomes its mirror opposite, a communist fairy tale of West German refugees from capitalism. This not only allows for the admission that the barrier between the two Germanies has fallen, but once again resembles watching a film as it rewinds. With the fall of the Wall, East Germany was like a water balloon that had sprung a leak, but Alex’s fake broadcast would have Christiane believe that the water is flowing into the balloon rather than out.

Christiane’s illness also ties into the film’s most persistent vertical motif: the space program. As a boy, Alex is obsessed with Sigmund Jahn, the first German cosmonaut to fly into space as part of the Soviet Union’s cooperative program with fellow socialist states. In his mind, Jahn’s launch into space becomes mixed up with Alex’s father’s defection to the West, and it is Jahn’s lookalike that Alex and Denis dress up for their final fake news broadcast. Christiane herself went nowhere when she was alive, declining to join her husband abroad, but after her death, Alex and his family launch her ashes on a toy rocket that he had built with his father long ago.

But the most obviously significant contrast to the mostly bedridden Christiane is the bizarre spectacle to which she is exposed during her brief, unsupervised excursion from her apartment: the huge statue of Vladimir Lenin, carried aloft and away by a helicopter. Lenin’s outstretched arm, a common feature of communist iconography, is no longer the commanding gesture of a leader addressing a crowd, but the odd farewell salute that gives the film its title. If we ignore the helicopter (as the camera does at key moments), the ascent of this ponderously heavy monument appears to defy gravity, in keeping with the Stalinist utopian emphasis on flight as a symbol of the communist trajectory. It is also a striking contrast with what we know about the fate of such statues in the wake of the Warsaw Pact, that they are torn down rather than elevated. Moreover, there is the matter of Lenin himself, whose body—like that of the sick and dying elders in Goodbye, Lenin!, The Funeral Party, and The Man Who Couldn’t Die—lies still in the mausoleum that had long been the symbolic center of Soviet power. What could be a more ironic end for one of the twentieth century’s most famous materialists than his ascension into heaven?

Socialism in One Bedroom

Next to Goodbye, Lenin!, The Man Who Couldn’t Die looks like a much grimmer affair, despite their shared premise. The World War II veteran Alexei Afanasievich Kharitonov has spent the past fifteen years confined to his bed after a stroke. His wife and stepdaughter are taking care of him, but not just out of a sense of filial obligation: they need his pension to get by. True, the children in Goodbye, Lenin! at one point are also in a budgetary bind thanks to their sick mother (she can’t remember where she has hidden a substantial amount of cash that is about to become worthless once the country switches to the Deutschmark), but their devotion to her survives the financial disaster Christiane inadvertently causes.

But it is the time frame that makes the most significant difference. Goodbye, Lenin! takes place in the months between the fall of the Wall and German reunification, when young people like Alex could still be excited about their future. The Man Who Couldn’t Die unfolds years after the collapse of the USSR, and optimism is in short supply. Alexei Afanasievich’s bedroom is dismal and oppressive, but the world outside his window is hardly joyous. Alexei Afanasievich’s stepdaughter, Marina, gets wrapped up in a corrupt election campaign for a candidate who has decided that bribing voters is simply paying for services rendered, and crass, rich New Russians show off their dubiously accumulated wealth.

Marina’s mother (and Alexei Afanasievich’s wife) Nina Alexandrovna is completely at a loss to understand the new society that has supplanted Soviet everyday life. For her and, to a lesser extent, for Marina, the timelessness of the old man’s bedroom has become something of a refuge. Indeed, everything they do for Alexei Afanasievich can be viewed as a kind of displaced self-interest: are they keeping him alive because they love him or because they need his money? Their years-long maintenance of the illusion of a perpetual Brezhnev era starts out as a way to avoid a fatal shock to the old man’s system, but it is the women who start to find comfort in their simulation. Alexei Afanasievich spends most of the novel trying to figure out how to kill himself with the little voluntary muscle control he has left.

The Man Who Couldn’t Die takes place mostly during the aforementioned election campaign, but its temporal scope is much broader. At Marina’s instigation, the two women began to curate Alexei Afanasievich’s reality years before the Soviet collapse:

At the first historic tremor, [Marina] had divined in the decrepit general secretary’s replacement by a younger, more energetic one not a pledge of Soviet life’s continuity but the beginning of the end. She immediately began preserving the substance of the era for future use and purging it of any new admixtures, no matter how harmless they seemed at first. So it came to pass that their good old Horizon television—on which only impressionistic bursts of static were still in color—showed the farewell to that great figure. (18–19)

Compared to the machinations of Alex and his friend in Goodbye, Lenin!, their scheme starts out low-tech: “Nina Alexandrovna was charged with reading the paralyzed man specific articles, which Marina made fat deletions in and supplied with handwritten insertions. Nina Alexandrovna carried out these instructions, although she was embarrassed by both the articles and her own voice” (19). Their task becomes more complicated when the gap between their simulation and the reality of perestroika grows too wide: “Very quickly, outside time became so altered that there wasn’t even anything in Pravda for Marina’s pen to rework” (19). Eventually, with the help of “computer whiz Kostik” (28) they begin to make their own fake news broadcasts: “they got so good at it that they were able to create the Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-Ninth Congresses of the Soviet Communist Party for the paralyzed man” (28).

Alex and his friend in Goodbye, Lenin! may occasionally enjoy themselves while maintaining an illusory East Germany, but their sense of purpose does not waver: their job is to keep Christiane alive. On at least two occasions, the film hints that their efforts might not be as necessary as they think (first, when we learn that Christiane had been willing to consider defecting to the West, and second, when Lara’s revelation of the truth does not cause her to immediately drop dead), but Christiane is always at the center of the simulation, as both inspiration and audience. The Man Who Couldn’t Die complicates the relationship between the deceivers and the deceived almost from the very beginning. Alexei Afanasievich is mute, so his family members can only guess about the effectiveness of their work, and even its necessity:

No one could say for certain whether their playacting was fooling the sick man, of course. Nina Alexandrovna, at least, thought she picked up a certain agreement, a semblance of approval in the signals emitted by his asymmetrical brain. Of course, Alexei Afanasievich had always not so much liked as considered it proper that his innumerous family wait on him hand and foot, so he may simply have been pleased with their efforts and the theatricalized fuss occasioned by his illness. (29)

In the absence of the kind of feedback that Christiane provides her children, the simulation in Slavnikova’s novel seems to exist for its own sake or, more properly, for the sake of the very people who have engineered it. Alexei Afanasievich’s bedroom, nicknamed the “Red Corner” after the Soviet propaganda displays that were encouraged in the country’s early decades, becomes a shrine to the undead Soviet past as embodied by Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, the long-dead Soviet leader who, in the book, is as functionally immortal as Alexei Afanasievich himself:

These properties had something to do with immortality. The general secretary’s rejuvenated photo—half documentary print and half retouched and clearly made during his lifetime—was striking for that very quasi-drawnness you see only in a dead person’s features … But what was amazing was this: the general secretary, whose death had here been reversed and whose longevity had become a natural feature that only kept increasing, had somehow borrowed an authenticity from Alexei Afanasievich that Brezhnev himself had never possessed. (21–22)

Of all the Soviet leaders who could have been chosen for the role of immortal icon, Brezhnev is the most appropriate for Slavnikova’s purposes. Once glasnost took hold under Gorbachev, one word that would doggedly attach itself to Brezhnev and his era: stagnation (zastoi). The word is equally applicable to the stifling bedroom that houses Alexei Afanasievich’s body, which, like Brezhnev in his last years, seems stuck in a liminal state between life and death. Marina’s Soviet charade is so good that “her stagnation had achieved perfection”:

Apparently, the period of stagnation preserved in the Red Corner would not allow for forward movement, so everything had fallen back in place; now that was even more true. At night, the window sealed shut for the winter would crackle and tinkle as if holding back the press of some growing mass, as if the paralyzed immortality were flexing an invisible muscle. (94)

After years of pretending to live in a never-ending Brezhnev era, both Marina and Nina Alexandrovna occasionally find themselves confused about basic questions of reality. Marina starts to see her political candidate, Apofeozov, as a threat, “the embodiment of the realest reality, … the opposite of the immortal little world she was defending” (49–50). Nina Alexandrovna sometime has the feeling that “Brezhnev’s funeral had indeed been a deception, a film someone had spliced together, that the years were still divided into five-year plans and the country, with all its heavy industry, was continuing to build communism in the heavens above” (29). The contrast between the imaginary USSR that they have so painstakingly maintained in Alexei Afanasievich’s bedroom and the world outside its walls produces an uncanny effect for the characters, if not the readers: both worlds are equally familiar, and yet both are always a bit “off.”

Their confusion is thematically appropriate. In keeping the Brezhnev era alive, they are inadvertently recapitulating that era’s salient feature: simulation itself. Countless jokes from the last years of Brezhnev’s life play on the idea that the general secretary is little more than a vegetable. But even more jokes highlight the gap in the Brezhnev era’s reality and its contemporary representation. One classic story about Soviet leaders on a broken-down train (updated each time a new leader came to power) contrasted each leader’s absurd approach to problem solving. When the train stops moving, Lenin calls for a voluntary work day to get it fixed, Stalin demands that all the train workers be executed, and Nikita Khrushchev posthumously rehabilitates them. And Brezhnev? He proposes pulling down the shades on all the windows, rocking back and forth, and pretending that the train is still moving.

Later versions of the joke are extended to include Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but the whole point of the family’s deception is to act as if the joke could not possibly be updated. No one else is ever going to get on that train. Alexei Afanasievich’s bedroom is more than simply a sanctuary for a nearly extinct Soviet habitat; it is a simulacrum of a simulation. The stagnation in this apartment is more perfect than the Brezhnev era could ever be, because it has divorced itself from time (the past several decades) and even biology (Alexei Afanasievich cannot [be allowed to] die). The novel’s indictment of Soviet nostalgia (realized here as an apartment-sized Brezhnev theme park) could not be more cutting, for the entire project represents the ever-shrinking horizons of a dying man in a simulated world that, whatever appeal it might have, can only be stifling. Small wonder that Alexei Afanasievich is suicidal; he is the last vestige of a world that self-destructed long ago.

Both The Man Who Couldn’t Die and Goodbye, Lenin! are thought experiments: how could we pretend that what Ken Jowitt called the “Leninist Extinction” never happened? To the extent that they inspire sympathy in their audience, their stories, like Ulitskaya’s The Funeral Party, rely on the very familiar human impulse to resist the death of a loved one. Both Slavnikova and Becker give us characters whose ongoing attempts to reconstruct the dead socialist system are motivated at least in part by love and are made possible by their particular time frame. The reconstruction projects begin either in the final days of the USSR (Slavnikova) or within a few months after the end of state socialism (Becker). Both the socialist systems and the moribund parents are steps away from death; they just happen to be on opposite sides of the dividing line between existence and oblivion. Goodbye, Lenin! and The Man Who Couldn’t Die derive their pathos from the fact that they are, in every way, near-death experiences.

Earlier I described Goodbye, Lenin! as melancholic, even if the objects of their melancholy are different. The juxtaposition of (anticipatory) mourning for a lost parent and retrospective mourning for a lost world has the advantage of drawing the focus to affect; while the stories are by no means apolitical, they remind audiences across the political spectrum that grief over a loss does not require that the lost object be unequivocally good or admirable. This even holds true for The Funeral Party. Ulitskaya’s characters have no love for the Soviet system, but the dying man at the center of the novel cannot escape his affective connection to his former homeland that is falling apart just slightly faster than he is. We grieve because we lost something that was ours.

Alik does not experience melancholia over the demise of the Soviet Union (to be fair, even if he were so inclined, this would require time that he no longer has). Alex, in contrast, rediscovers an attachment to East Germany’s space program that would not have been at the forefront of his mind; rather than bury his mother, he shoots her ashes into the atmosphere on a homemade rocket, a simultaneous farewell to mother and motherland. The end of the film points to successful mourning rather than endless melancholia: Alex has held a funeral for his mother, started a life with a young woman, and is poised to look toward the future. Situating the story of the attempted reconstruction of the socialist past so closely to the time of the system’s collapse creates the hope that this obsessive attachment will prove to be just a phase. The Man Who Couldn’t Die leaves much less room for such a hope, because even though the reconstruction begins at the moment of the system’s death, the story (and Alexei Afanasievich’s dying) extends for years. Slavnikova makes melancholia an ongoing feature of post-Soviet life.

Building Communism through Time Travel

Maintaining the illusion that the Soviet Union continues to exist is a grueling effort requiring unrelenting vigilance. Over time, it is doomed to fail. There are simply too many variables to account for, too many opportunities for the truth to seep into a carefully constructed bubble of alternative Soviet reality. The limits of realism, however, are no match for the tropes of science fiction. A present-day Soviet Union is as credible an alternate history scenario as Hitler winning World War II, but the most prominent examples are from a genre we have already examined at great length. This is a job for Time Crashers.

Preventing the downfall of the USSR is the main goal of the time-traveling Natasha in Arsenyev’s Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete, but Natasha has to die to make it happen. Only in the novel’s brief epilogue do we get a glimpse of twenty-first-century Soviet life, while the other stories in the collection propose a joint Soviet/Nazi empire to ensure a radiant future. We get a fuller vision of today’s Soviet Union on the two television series that brought the Time Crasher genre to the small screen: The Dark Side of the Moon and Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone (Chernobyl’: Zona otchuzhdeniia).

In chapter 2, I analyze the first season of The Dark Side of the Moon as an example of a Time Crasher ending up in the Soviet past; the second and final season returns its hero to a 2011 that, thanks to Solovyov’s actions in 1979, is dominated by a technologically advanced and largely benevolent USSR. The second season aired in 2016, four years after the first. With sixteen hour-length episodes, Season 2 is one of the most extensive presentations of a persistent Soviet Union ever produced.

Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone, though populated by very different characters from those of The Dark Side of the Moon and revolving around the Chernobyl disaster, oddly mirrors its predecessor. The show began broadcasting its first season in October 2014. It was such a hit that a second season appeared three years later, and the story concluded in 2019 in a series of three television films that told a single story from different angles, with different endings in each film.

Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone centers around a group of teenage characters who seem designed to remind older viewers why they hate teenagers. The plot is set in motion by Igor Matveev, a particularly unsavory young man who, pretending to be emergency tech support, steals the cash that the parents of Pasha, the de facto leader of his friend group, had set aside for purchasing a new apartment. Igor is on his way to Chernobyl, and the friends follow him by subscribing to his video podcast, in which he describes his travels at the same time as he demonstrates the rapid decline of his mental equilibrium. One of Pasha’s friends, Anna, lost her older sister in Pripyat right before the disaster, so the trip takes on a personal significance for her. The upshot is that the group travels back in time to the day before the disaster and avert it. Then, in Season 2, the teens find themselves back in the present but in an alternate future in which a nuclear disaster in Maryland has led to the collapse of the United States, while the USSR has managed to live long and prosper. In the final three movies, they fight and defeat the malign mystical forces that had been toying with them from the start.

Each of these series features an involuntary trip to the past: 1979 for Dark Side and 1986 for Chernobyl. In the latter series, the trip takes place only toward the end of the first season, but the stakes are obviously higher: the teenagers are traveling to one of the most significant, and deadly, moments of late Soviet history. Where Chernobyl’s focus on crisis is obvious in its very name, Dark Side invites its viewers to join Solovyov on a journey to a time defined by crisis’s opposite: stability, stagnation, and order. The historical change wrought by Solovyov is easily explained by the Butterfly Effect, helpfully and clumsily introduced in the second season’s first episode by the hero’s random encounter with a little boy reading Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story “A Sound of Thunder.”⁶

Nevertheless, each series incorporates a state-destroying crisis into its alternate present—one explicitly, the other more vaguely. In both Chernobyl and Dark Side, the USSR is flourishing, but the United States has collapsed. Chernobyl appears to be governed by a law of conservation of disaster. Thanks to the teens’ intervention at the end of Season 1, the Chernobyl reactor does not melt down, but, for reasons that are never made clear, on August 7, 1986, the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant near Lusby, Maryland, melts down instead.⁷ Since the entire plot of the series revolves around the mystical consequences of nuclear disaster, the US nuclear accident serves as the impetus for moving most of the series’ action from the USSR to the Divided States of America (Raz”edenennnye shtaty Ameriki). As a result, the viewers’ exposure to the twenty-first-century Soviet Union is rather brief.

In Dark Side, the United States is also in chaos, with would-be refugees desperate to immigrate to the USSR. Unfortunately, any North American visitors who might think of staying in the Soviet Union have been chipped by the US Embassy, and unless they can get access to a technology called a “Russifier” (russifikator), they will die. As for the USSR, it has expanded from fifteen to more than two dozen constituent Soviet Socialist Republics and is a global economic and technological leader.

One might ask: why does the fantasy of a persistent Soviet Union seem to necessitate the collapse of the United States? But an even better question might be: what does it mean to ask this question, and what does it mean not to? Chernobyl, at least, implicitly acknowledges the role of the USSR’s internal problems; in both the USSR and the alternate United States, nuclear meltdowns kickstart the state’s disintegration. But framing the collapse of a global superpower as a zero-sum game in these two works implies a theory behind the downfall of the USSR. If the Soviet Union truly fell apart on its own, then there is no need to imagine its survival would have such an effect on the United States. The complementary distribution of civilizational collapse means something quite different: the end of the USSR is understood as a defeat in its conflict with its US rival. Two things are at work here: first, the persistence not only of the USSR but of the Cold War framework that died with it; and second, the transformation of what was once a fringe conspiracy theory into something close to common knowledge. The USSR did not fall; it was pushed, by a vast network of US espionage and subversive influence, possibly even including Gorbachev as an American agent of influence.

Even without this conspiratorial framework, imagining the destruction of the United States has its own appeal. After years of humiliation, not to mention highhanded treatment on the part of the United States and its allies, watching the United States suffer the Soviet Union’s fate has to be intensely gratifying.

Both Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone and Dark Side of the Moon temper Soviet nostalgia with a post-Soviet desire for the good life. The Soviet Union endures not by reverting to Stalinist repression or even by maintaining Brezhnevian stagnation on never-ending life support. The fantasy sold by each is that the Soviet Union remains a great power, preserves the most salient (and fondly remembered) aspects of Soviet mass culture and daily life, and keeps immorality in check, all while ushering in an age of economic prosperity that the USSR never lived to see.

While each alternate present gestures toward a power structure that is familiarly Soviet (a general secretary, a Communist Party, and all its associated organizations), the economic miracle that provides Soviet citizens with a high standard of living in Chernobyl looks suspiciously un-Soviet. Dark Side still has variations on familiar consumer restrictions (batteries can be purchased only two at a time); its economic growth appears to be the result of the general secretary’s knowledge of the other timeline (Solovyov revealed it to him in Season 1) and the fulfilled potential of Soviet science. Chernobyl has both a ruling Communist Party and private corporations, with little sign that anything remotely resembling communism is actually being built.

Chernobyl’s Soviet present is a relatively brief stopover for our time-traveling teens. They stay in this timeline for all of Season 2 but spend most of it in the United States—and even there, they also jump farther into the past for a couple of episodes. The show’s producers seem more interested in the changes this timeline has wrought on our heroes: the nerd (Gosha) and the bully (Lyosha) switch roles, and the tough redhead Nastya switches romantic ties from one to the other at the same time. The four main characters, led by the heroic Pasha, are no longer a group, and some of them do not even know each other. Anya, who joins the gang by chance in Season 1, rejoins them in Season 2 because she happens to be a flight attendant on the plane taking them to America. Though all of them have their circumstances changed, Pasha is initially the only one who remembers the original timeline, and, in any case, the course of these characters’ lives is determined less by sociopolitical circumstance than by the mystical forces behind both the Chernobyl and Calvert Cliff accidents (or, less charitably, the ham-handed plotting of the show’s producers).

Aside from the characters themselves, what is most striking about the twenty-first-century USSR is how much it has in common with the original timeline. Both versions have overprivileged gilded youth (in Season 2, they are the offspring of party bigwigs); both have powerful security ministries to contend with, and, curiously, both have large corporations that are presumably private. The second season’s villain, Dmitry Kinyaev, is an American refugee child who grows up to run GlobalKintek, a sinister atomic energy company.⁸ If we set aside the mysticism, time travel, and alternate dimensions, Chernobyl’s twenty-first-century Soviet Union looks a lot like … China.

China, we should recall, has long represented the late Soviet Union’s road not taken. Where the USSR liberalized the political and public spheres while having a chaotic approach to economics, China did the opposite. Its leaders liberalized the economy while keeping a tight rein on politics and speech. This alternative started to look appealing to the large swaths of the impoverished and humiliated in the Russian Federation, especially during the 1990s. Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone offers its viewers a Chinese model of avoiding the Soviet collapse: state capitalism with a communist face.

The twenty-first-century USSR of The Dark Side of the Moon is more complicated, which is fitting; where Chernobyl uses an alternate Soviet present primarily to complicate an already elaborate plot, The Dark Side of the Moon’s second season is devoted entirely to the ramifications of its Soviet premise. This was not a foregone conclusion; even by the end of the first season, there was no reason to expect the series to bring its hero to a present-day Soviet Union. When Mikhail Mikhailovich Solovyov awakens in the first episode of Dark Side of the Moon’s second season, his 1979 odyssey is finally over. But the story is only beginning or, really, beginning again. In real time, three years have passed since the first season’s premiere, while on the show, Solovyov has jumped thirty-two years into the future/his original present. The show has been rebooted, not once but twice. The first season ended with a cliffhanger. Solovyov, who had spent the first season in the body of his father, tells the doctor who addresses him that he is not Mikhail Mikhailovich (the Solovyov of 2011), but Mikhail Ivanovich (Solovyov’s father, who died in the very first episode of the series). The scene is set for a new round of disorientation, this time a form of future shock: how will Solovyov père react to the twenty-first-century world of Solovyov fils?

Unfortunately for any viewers who might have spent almost three years waiting on the edge of their seats to find out, this question is left unanswered. During the series hiatus, the producers must have rejected this conceit for their sequel season. In Episode 1 of Season 1, Solovyov repeats the claim that he is Mikhail Ivanovich but immediately retracts it. Mikhail Ivanovich remains stubbornly dead. Instead of enacting a mere inversion of the first season, now Solovyov slowly comes to realize that the 2011 to which he has returned is not the same as the 2011 he left after his initial car accident. He is still in the militia, but he is a beat cop instead of an officer. Unmarried in the original timeline, now he is separated from his wife, who is raising his daughter with her new lover. His daughter’s schoolteacher is Katya (his love interest from Season 1), and the redheaded murderer he chased into the past now teaches at the same school. But the biggest difference, of course, is that the Soviet Union never collapsed.⁹

One might expect that, after the first season, Solovyov would adjust to his new world like an experienced Time Crasher, but instead, he makes the same rookie mistakes, repeatedly exposing his ignorance to his colleagues and family and letting them chalk it up to a post-accident concussion. As in the previous season, the producers treat the viewers to numerous in-jokes and easter eggs. In Season 1, when Solovyov insists on finding his mobile phone, a doctor offers him a toy telephone on wheels and a string. Now, everyone has a phone, but the Soviet-made phones are oversized and made of wood. Muscovites still watch the TV show Dom-2 (literally, House 2), but instead of the familiar “Big Brother” reality show clone, the Soviet version is a documentary about groups of young people building actual houses without competing to live in them. And when a case brings Solovyov in contact with an eccentric beekeeper, the man turns out to be named Sergei Sobyanin (in our world, the mayor of Moscow since 2010).

These trivial examples are dwarfed by the scope of the USSR’s transformation since 1979 (when Solovyov was in the past) or since the late 1980s (when perestroika apparently never materialized). From news reports and throwaway lines, we learn that there is a bridge to Alaska under construction in the Aleutian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), that Finland is the twenty-third SSR, and that, thanks to a deal signed by the “Baron of the Gypsies” making him a “Baron of the USSR” (!), the Gypsy Soviet Socialist Republic brings the overall count up to twenty-six (as opposed to the historical fifteen).¹⁰ It is not enough for the USSR to fail to collapse; it has expanded both in territory and hegemonic influence.

As in the first season, Solovyov has to relearn a great deal about the profession to which he has devoted his entire adult life. The crime rate is apparently even lower than it was in the 1970s, but with little evidence of a significantly repressive state security apparatus ferreting out freethinkers and suppressing dissent. True, some of the system’s success has dystopian overtones. The militia is completely unprepared to hunt a serial killer such as the redhead because it solved its “maniac” problem years ago. Children with mental problems are detected early and “fixed.” Overall, the militia seems to have degraded in the absence of any real challenge. Solovyov meets with indignation when he casually reminds his superior that, in an investigation, you always toss out your first theory; any good militiaman knows that the first theory is always right.

For Solovyov, at least, the flaws in the Soviet 2011 are hardly deal breakers. This revitalized Soviet Union is closer to a utopia than the country ever came, even if minor imperfections help make it seem more grounded. By creating a brave new world that feels somehow lived in (lived, in fact, in Minsk, since Belarus does a good job standing in for a twenty-first-century USSR without any special effects at all), Dark Side of the Moon, Season 2, offers an extended twist on some of the phenomena we’ve already seen in this book. The series projects the past onto the present without ignoring the passage of time. Dark Side of the Moon presents its alternate Soviet Union as a kind of conditional-subjunctive nostalgia.

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

For reasons never made clear, the prosperity of the alternate Soviet Union in Dark Side of the Moon entails a total realignment of the rest of the world. Desperate would-be immigrants from the “United French Emirates” line up in front of the Soviet Embassy, while Soviet-born Israeli refugees are welcomed back with open arms, as Premier Savrasov declares that there is “no such thing as an-ex citizen of the USSR.”¹¹ At one point, faced with an overly controlling father, a grown daughter, fumes: “What kind of domostroi is this? As if we lived in Holland, and not the Soviet Union!” A little girl in one episode was adopted from England right before pogroms broke out and cured of a disease thanks to superior Soviet medicine. Technically, these are all throwaway lines, the geopolitical equivalent of the references to Sobyanin and Russian reality TV. But they are significant to the show’s world building, in part because they betray the origins of this particular alternate scenario. Europe and the Western world in Season 2 suffer the fate that conspiracy theorists and state propaganda have been predicting for years: France is overrun by Muslims, and the most liberal of Western countries (the Netherlands) is now in the grips of a fundamentalist revanche.

Unsurprisingly, it is the United States that has it worst. Or rather, the former United States. Now that the country has broken apart, the Southern states have recreated the Confederacy under the presidency of Chuck Norris. The previously mentioned North American refugees in the USSR (nicknamed sevushki from the word for “north”) are fleeing a country torn not just by political strife but by chronic insomnia, the breakdown of interpersonal communication (too much texting), and the dictatorship of the dollar. The miseries of capitalism become soapy entertainment in a TV drama called The Fall of the Oligarch, with plot twists including a woman who says “I love you” only after being given a check and a terrible boss who encourages a subordinate to jump out the office window to his death.¹² Moscow audiences flock to a musical called My Fair American, about an ignorant girl from the former United States trying to learn how to act and speak Soviet.

And, really, who wouldn’t want a Soviet life in the world of Season 2? Toys for children are free. The state has a reality television-style social program to try to rescue failing marriages. If you’re caught speeding, you simply apologize and promise to try to do better. True, tobacco, junk food, and alcohol have been banned, and people in key professions have to watch their weight in order to keep their jobs. Batteries can be bought only two at a time, and woe betide the scofflaw who tries to get immediately back in line. But Solovyov finds this a small price to pay. As he tells his friends in one of the last episodes, he comes from a world with no USSR. There’s more crime, the telephones are better, but the people are pettier.

If anything, Solovyov undersells the contemporary Soviet Union’s appeal, because he neglects to mention the key difference that accounts for the country’s prosperity: the triumph of Soviet science. Sick people from around the world flock to the USSR for treatment; even cancer is no match for the power of Soviet medicine. Soviet scientists have also invented a special device to treat sleeplessness, with bootleg versions sought out by desperate American insomniacs. But the most emblematic accomplishment is revealed in the second season’s premiere: the Soviet Union has sent cosmonauts to Mars.

In practical terms, the success of the Soviet space program means little, but symbolically, it signals that the country has fulfilled its postwar promise. The national pride in sending Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961 cannot be overstated. For Soviets in the 1960s, space was a site of scientific romance. As we see in the next chapter, a revitalized space program is the key to numerous twenty-first-century fantasies of a Soviet future. A triumphant Soviet Union is almost impossible to imagine without somehow winning the space race. As if to signal the centrality of space exploration, the second season returns to the series’ primal scene: the site of Solovyov’s accident. In the first season, Solovyov just happens to be injured right in front of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (torn down in the early Soviet years and rebuilt in the 1990s); he knows he is in 1979 when the cathedral is replaced by the large public swimming pool located on that site for most of the Soviet era. In Soviet 2011, the same spot is now occupied by a Museum of Space Construction.

An Officer of the Law

Science and geopolitics create the setting for Season 2, but they rarely rank among its hero’s top concerns. At heart, the show is still a police procedural. As in the first season, many of the legal violations that Solovyov encounters are difficult for the contemporary viewer to call “crimes.” Take, for example, the store managers who manipulate the algorithm that determines eligibility for purchasing new furniture; because of them, some select customers can buy a couch in two months rather than eight. Certainly, there is an element of corruption involved (the managers are probably accepting bribes), but the algorithm itself is hard to take seriously. As always, Solovyov might have an opinion, but it does not affect the performance of his duties. His willingness to enforce the law—any law—makes him a good cop. But why are his actions so acceptable within the framework of the series?

Solovyov’s refusal to engage with the ideology behind his country’s laws—whether in the 1979 Soviet Union, the 2011 Russian Federation, or the 2011 USSR—makes him the perfect hero for the twenty-first century’s second decade. One of the great successes of Putinism has been its ability to push back any cognitive dissonance one might have about unconditional love for the motherland in any of its historical iterations. The Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation are all instances of the hero of the country’s history: the state. Its laws and actions may be just or unjust, but that is not up to the individual to decide.

Here the imperatives of the genre come close to clashing with the overriding logic of the state. As an action hero, Solovyov must make decisions that will almost always be correct, and as a police officer, he must uphold the law, but as an accidental time traveler who inadvertently disrupts history, he exemplifies the dangers of individual improvisation. Upon his return to the proper timeline in the last few minutes of the series, Solovyov asks a passerby, “Who’s the president? Putin?” and gets the response, “No, Medvedev!” The answer is correct, and it does not matter that, after thirty-two episodes of time travel, Solovyov forgot that Medvedev was (technically) running the country. The Russian Federation’s leadership matters to him only to the extent that the leader is whoever the leader is supposed to be.

Fables of Reconstruction

The lessons of Solovyov’s travel to an alternative Soviet present and his return to a briefly estranged Medvedev era are about the irrelevance of politics and ideology to the life of the post-Soviet individual. Wherever he goes, his concerns are basically the same: saving the people he loves and finding personal happiness. The subtext of The Dark Side of the Moon is not only that the personal is not political in contemporary Russia, but that we can even imagine the personal as apolitical during Soviet times. Solovyov’s experience suggests the possibility that the Soviet past can be mined for its cultural and historical treasures without yielding the ideological equivalent of blood diamonds.

When recreating the Soviet era moves from the global scope of alternative history to the controlled experiments of local “real life,” the ability to separate ideology from the everyday becomes a contested question. Reconstructing the past is a different project from maintaining that a pivotal historical event (the collapse of the USSR) never happened. Moreover, these reconstruction projects are comfortably distant from the traumatic event, set at more than a generation’s remove, making room for theme park kitsch and the formulas of the reality show. Out of a diverse set of aesthetic and political motivations, the 2006 film Park of the Soviet Period, a subsequent real-life event by the same name in Moscow, a three-volume novel by Alexandra Marinina, and the notorious art project DAU all create Soviet simulacra within the tightly controlled geographical and ideological boundaries of a localized social experiment. What most of these works fail to engage with, however, is the gap between the Soviet Union as lived experience and the USSR as ideological simulacrum. When the Soviet Union still existed, that gap required little explanation. Indeed, it was arguably a part of that very lived experience that the post-Soviet simulations attempt to reconstruct.

With 1991 well in the rearview mirror, what purpose could a small-scale reconstruction of the Soviet Union serve? On the most superficial level, it is a profit-seeking (i.e., capitalist) attempt to capitalize on nostalgia for the days of Soviet state socialism. It is also a matter of working with what one has. Russia may not be the home of Disney, but as one entrepreneur brags in the Park of the Soviet Period film, “We’ll prove that our horrors are the most horrible in all the world!”

Actual attempts at Soviet reconstructions as an entertainment event have been few and far between. In 2008, the small Volga city of Tutaev opened a Park of the Soviet Period (presumably taking the name from the movie) as both a tourist attraction and a local recreation site constructed on an existing town square. More humble than the other examples considered in this chapter, the Tutaev park was never meant to be a miniature model of the Soviet Union in its entirety. Instead, it is designed to look like a typical “park of culture and rest” from the late Soviet period. As one reviewer on autotravel.ru put in in 2011: “O, Park of the Soviet Period is an exaggeration. It’s just a local park. Tiny. The most noteworthy part of the park is the sign at the entrance. There are thematic sculptures along the pathways. That’s it” (“Park sovetsokogo perioda”).

The Tutaev park inverts the logic of Soviet simulation. As Mikhail Epstein writes:

Signs of a new reality, of which Soviet citizens were so proud in the thirties and fifties, from Stalin’s massive hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River to Khrushchev’s decision to raise corn and Brezhnev’s numerous autobiographies, were actually pure ideological simulations of reality. This artificial reality was intended to demonstrate the superiority of ideas over simple facts … The presence of the idea of a sausage confronts the absence of real meat therein. The presence of a plan for manufacturing confronts the absence of actual production. (194)

The city officials promoting Tutaev’s park are making the opposite sort of promise: in their Park of the Soviet Period, visitors will encounter a satisfying simulation of a significant aspect of the Soviet experience, but the result was a shoddy, underwhelming product that could not live up to its hype. They promised a facsimile of Soviet ideology but delivered a worthy successor to actual Soviet workmanship.

The Park of the Soviet Period advertised in Moscow in 2019 had more resources available to it and had the advantage of being more an event than a place. Located in the area surrounding the Ostankino television station, this park opened on July 20 and closed on August 2, a two-week period that the organizers were determined to pack with fun for the whole family: “Tabletop games—a feature of Soviet parks, racing with retro-bicycles, a model club, an air rifle range, young pioneer groups, volleyball and foosball, and guitar poetry will transport the guests to the atmosphere of the Sixties and Seventies” (“‘Park sovetskogo perioda’ poiavitsia”). In addition, from July 20 to 27, visitors could also attend Soviet fashion shows and dance parties, where they could learn to dance the Boogie-Woogie.

The video advertisement circulating on VKontakte (“Iunost’”) underscores how the event underplayed ideological symbols in favor of sheer entertainment. Yes, we see people dressed in Pioneer costumes and military garb, but the emphasis is on the games and the dancing. What is on offer here is not so much a trip back to the Soviet Union per se as a nostalgic revisiting of the songs, dances, and games that were popular in late Soviet times. For decades after the Soviet collapse, critics have debated the significance of Soviet symbols deployed in post-Soviet entertainment: was there such a thing as innocent nostalgia, or were the films and television shows that used Soviet music and imagery to touch viewers’ heartstrings a Trojan horse for more pernicious content?¹³ At the very least, events such as the Ostankino Soviet park helped normalize the Soviet past as something to either be proud of or simply not be ashamed of, enabling the general tendency to downplay the regime’s crimes in favor of “the positive.”

But even if this project were intended to be ideologically neutral, the spectacle of Russian citizens partying in Soviet drag becomes more difficult to watch in the aftermath of the 2022 Ukrainian invasion. As scholars have argued since the days of Louis Marin’s 1977 semiotic analysis of Disneyland, theme parks are efficient vehicles for repackaging and transmitting ideology in the most anodyne of forms. The commercial for the Ostankino park project puts dancing, gaming, and donning Soviet garb on the same level by cutting from one to the other quickly; no matter what they are doing, everyone is smiling. At least as presented in the commercial (unfortunately, I missed the two-week window for visiting by about three years), the ideology Ostankino is selling is not exactly Soviet. Rather, it is a fantasy about the Soviet, and the way that the Soviet can be seamlessly integrated into a post-Soviet life. The only visible slogan is Stalin’s “Life has become better, life has become happier!,” which takes on new meaning in this twenty-first-century context. Stalinism also prominently featured smiling people in its propaganda, but the Stalinist smile is fixed and determined, making it all the more noteworthy given the fact that, generally, public smiling was not a feature of Soviet life. The smiles in the commercial are completely different: they look like the smiles of people who are actually enjoying themselves. Their smiles look spontaneous (which could just be good acting), directing the focus to the subjective pleasurable experience of the park visitors (never a prominent feature in Stalinist propaganda). Life has truly become better, but not in the way that Stalin’s slogan implied. Instead, the visitors are prosperous bourgeois subjects of Putinist capitalism, and the Soviet past is both their inheritance and their playground.

As discussed in the introduction, the Jurassic-Park influenced phrase “Park of the Soviet Period” is an almost inevitable Russian locution; it is as catchy in Russian as it is clunky in English. Nevertheless, both instantiations of the post-Soviet Soviet Park clearly owe their name to the 2006 film. Directed by Yuli Guzman from a screenplay by Guzman and Eduard Akopov, Park of the Soviet Period was a commercial flop ($130,000 in ticket sales versus a $5.2 million budget) (Lavrov) that nevertheless sparked heated critical discussion and even a novelization by the screenwriters in conjunction with Aleksei Kozuliaev. Jam-packed with celebrity cameos (the Soviet crooner-turned-Putinist legislator Iosif Kobzon; Vladimir Etush, reprising his role from the beloved 1967 film Kidnapping, Caucasian Style; the journalist Elena Khanga; and even the journalist and future master propagandist Vladimir Solovyov), Park of the Soviet Period is overstuffed on every level: the plot is a strange mishmash of genres and pastiches, the characters’ motivations conflict in a manner less suggestive of depth than of shoddy writing. Most important, the film’s point of view on the Soviet legacy is, by the end, almost incomprehensible. If the film’s representation of the Soviet past is muddled, it inadvertently succeeds as the incarnation of early Putinism: when it comes to history, the film is trying to have it all ways at once.

The hero of the film is Oleg Zimin, a television journalist who is assigned to visit the new Park of the Soviet Period as an honored guest, in order to eventually produce a flattering review. The park, which is meant to provide an “exclusive experience of the USSR,” is supposedly divided up into all fifteen Soviet republics, but most of what we see and hear about is thematic rather than national: there are plans for a “Gulag experience,” complete with interrogations for guests who meet the minimum health requirements; there’s a Civil War parade, a rocket launch meant to replicate Gagarin’s famous flight, and a reenactment of the Virgin Lands campaign (an agricultural mobilization movement that ran from 1954 to 1963 and was romanticized in Soviet film and fiction). One reviewer on kinopoisk.ru (“Retsenzii”) compared the premise to Westworld (the 1973 Michael Crichton film—this was before the HBO television series came out), but Park of the Soviet Period is both more complex and less consistent in its treatment of simulated history as fantasy. The Park of the Soviet Period is not just a resort where people can experience the Soviet past; it is also a twenty-first-century resort designed to mimic a Soviet-era resort. The facility Zimin stays in accepts Soviet rubles, has “Soviet” staff, and even serves “Soviet” beer. (“There’s no better beer than our Zhigulevskoe,” a staff member tells Zimin, before admitting that it’s actually German.) As the last example demonstrates, the staff are in character by default but willing to break the frame every now and then. Dinner is served in a luxurious dining hall, with Soviet-style food and Soviet-style entertainment and speeches, but also the possibility of sitting at a table with three different men dressed as the legendary World War II secret agent Stirlitz. The announcements maintain the overall pretense of living in the Soviet Union while still reminding guests of entertainment options that involve visiting various non-overlapping historical eras.

Since the park is a resort, it offers all the comforts of a high-end Soviet spa, and Zimin discovers he is partial to Charcot showers, a common Soviet-era hydrotherapy treatment which involves spraying the patient with a hose-like device that issues high-pressure streams of water. He is even more partial to Alyona, the staff member who administers the showers, and he spends the first part of the film crudely courting her. The resort administration warns him off, explaining that there is a nonfraternization rule, but he persists and eventually wins her over. Soon their forbidden love turns the resort experience into a dystopian nightmare: Zimin is falsely accused of rape, drugged, and tortured (with the very same Charcot shower he liked so much). He escapes captivity, gets into physical fights with the staff, and even (portentously) knocks over one of the Lenin statues that decorates the park. Just when he and Alyona are about to be released, his captors are attacked by … Soviet Cossacks and soldiers, apparently led by the famous Red Army Commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev.

Zimin is introduced at the beginning of the film as a cynical, burnt-out media figure fighting a hangover and waking up next to a woman who surprises him with a request for money. After just a few blasts from Alyona’s Charcot shower, he is head over heels in love with a woman he has just met. Alyona, it turns out, is a true believer. When they argue on the set of the Virgin Lands reenactment, she rebukes him for treating the park as just a source of entertainment: “For me, this is something holy. My grandfather told me about the Virgin Lands, how they worked for the state for free. And you act like it’s a zoo, Oleg, and we’re in a cage, and the whole world is outside. It was more pure. And you ruined it! I hate you!”

Of course, in keeping with the hackneyed plotting and muddled ideology, this exchange is followed by a passionate kiss. But when contrasted with Zimin’s behavior in the film’s opening scene, it does give the impression that Park of the Soviet Period will show us how immersion in the Soviet past makes Oleg a better man. And, indeed, Oleg does become a better man, but it is as much from having Soviet institutions to resist as it is from any moral superiority monopolized by the previous regime. His fight against the senseless and hypocritical rules of the park gives him what the Soviet Union gave its believers: purpose. If that purpose is in itself anti-Soviet, so be it; he needs the oppressive regime as an enemy in order to free himself from the mere hedonism of his post-Soviet existence.

In fact, this is what truly makes Park of the Soviet Period an effective theme park and historical reenactment. Zimin is now the hero in an unimaginative story of an individualist’s rebellion against a dystopian state. He gets to rail against tyranny, topple statues, and (in a visual echo of the classic British dystopian television series The Prisoner) engage in fist fights with reactionaries on a giant chess board. Zimin himself has mixed feelings about nostalgia, but once the plot gets moving, he is trapped in a secondhand 1984, with forbidden romance as a gateway to subversion. But once again, the film’s approach to ideology blurs the picture. Alyona, after all, is a true believer. It is as if Winston Smith fell in love with a Julia who, rather than pretending to be overzealous in order to avoid scrutiny, was absolutely committed to her work in the Anti-Sex League.

Even his opponents are poor stand-ins for totalitarian despots. Their cause is not Stalinism per se, or even communism; it is simply the Soviet past itself. As one of them tells Zimin: “We have ideals. You gave up all the good things, the social services, the equality.” He then dismisses Zimin’s critique of the park’s severity: “As soon as a liberal screws a girl, he remembers 1937.” Later, one of Zimin’s torturers tells him, “You took everything from us! You were raised by us, got so much, and threw it all away! … Our ancestors knew what they were living for!” It may look as though Zimin is reviving the fight against Stalinist repression, but his fight, which is with living people who refused to acknowledge that the regime’s crimes outweighed its benefits, is actually once removed. At moments like these, the film seems to have a clear target: pernicious nostalgia for an overidealized past that was abusive and cruel.

For most of the film, it is possible to believe that the director is luring his viewers in with the charms of the Soviet past, only to remind them how terrible things actually were. Zimin’s arrival at the park is accompanied by Timur Shaov’s “Soviet Tango,” which enacts this very process:

This all works, more or less, until that final scene with the Soviet Cossacks saving the day, as Alyona cries out with joy, “It’s our guys!” (Nashi!). If these men are “ours,” then what does that make the quasi-Soviet tin tyrants who run the park? Or, for that matter, Zimin, whose nostalgia for the past has never included the communists?

After the credits start to roll, Guzman and Akopov leave the viewers with one last moment of ideological portent: Zimin and Alyona are driving a flatbed truck laden with cargo that is mostly covered by tarps, with the exception of statues of two Soviet Young Pioneers gazing off into the distance. They meet a smaller truck heading the opposite direction, whose driver asks them, “Does this road lead to the Park of the Soviet Period?” Zimin replies, “No, this is Shosse Svobody [Freedom Highway].” The driver, who turns out to be transporting Lenin’s Mausoleum, says, “What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to the Park of the Soviet Period?” The line is an almost word-for-word restatement of the famous phrase from Tengiz Abuladze’s groundbreaking perestroika film, Repentance (1984), the story of a local tyrant with clear parallels to the Stalin years. At the end of that film, an old woman asks one of the protagonists if the road leads to the church, only to hear the reply, “No, this is Valam Street” (named after the tyrant). The old woman responds, “What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?” In the Abuladze film, this is a spiritual rebuke to the tyrant’s cult of personality, which makes the paraphrase in Park of the Soviet Period all the more puzzling. Zimin offers freedom, but the driver sees value only in the Soviet past. Yet Zimin himself is transporting a statue of Young Pioneers. As the credits continue, a warning appears at the top of the frame: “The autopilot has been turned off! All responsibility lies with you!”

The message in those words, at least, is clear: think for yourself. Park of the Soviet Period is using roads and routes as a metaphor for political choices, but the conflicting maps and signs are more suggestive of a ten-car pileup. Perhaps this is a comment on the very syncretism that characterizes so much Soviet and imperial nostalgia. The problem is that the affective relationship with the past entails an almost total suspension of judgment: Lenin is “ours,” the Cossacks are “ours,” and in the imperial nostalgic culture of late Putinism, the tsars are also “ours.” More to the point, so is Zimin.

Products of Their Times

Implicit in the stories of Soviet reenactments is an unquestioned axiom about the relationship between people, their times, and their environment. The Park of the Soviet Period was ostensibly built for the twin purposes of recreation and profit, but the unfolding of the plot demonstrates the power that even a simulated environment has on its participants. The park cannot automatically transform every participant into a Soviet true believer; on Zimin, it has precisely the opposite effect. But this is still an effect, and, more important, a Soviet effect. Zimin has gone from a jaded, post-Soviet libertine to a cross between a dissident and a (counter)revolutionary, but both the pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet stances are evidence of a Soviet subject position. Anti-Soviet subjectivity is just Soviet subjectivity with the polarity reversed.

As a representation of a sociological experiment in reconstructing the past, Park of the Soviet Period is hopelessly scattershot: the park, with its multiple attractions and themes, refuses to commit to a specific time period. Its value is as a perhaps inadvertent representation of the syncretic, inconsistent “Soviet past” that has been the object of popular nostalgia: the nostalgia isn’t for a particular period that existed but for an imaginary Sovietness that can exist only as a fiction. In her 2018 novel, Gorky Quest, Alexandra Marinina goes in a different direction: she chronicles the attempt to reconstruct the Soviet 1970s in one building, populating it with young people who were born long after the USSR collapsed. Now we are dealing with the recreation of a period that many of her readers, like the author herself, remember personally.

Much of the novel is devoted to the design of the experiment, reflecting both the fictional masterminds’ and the author’s dedication to their idea of accuracy. Though the novel represents a departure from Marinina’s best-known books (which usually feature an investigator trying to solve a murder), it shares the philosophy that underlies all her work: with the proper application of professional, systematic thinking, anything is possible. In Gorky Quest, as in most of her novels, characters indulge in pages-long monologues in which they demonstrate just how thoroughly they have thought about a particular question. For the reader, the mileage on such speeches may vary, but the characters who deliver the monologues derive immense satisfaction from elaborating just how right they are.

Underneath its convoluted plotting, Gorky Quest is a drama about the problem of nature vs. nurture. They key word, however, is “about.” The books do not actually engage with this problem on the level of action and character. Instead, the premise is that, in order to conclude a 150-year-long crackpot experiment in eugenics, a group of young twenty-first-century Russians must pretend to live in the 1970s so as to replicate the thinking habits of a young man of that time. Richard Wiley, an aging Russian-to-English translator from the United States, has come to Moscow in the hopes of gaining information that will allow him to claim a prize set up as part of his family’s trust. The Wiley-Cooper clan traces its roots back to the mid-nineteenth century, when its patriarch became convinced that he could turn his offspring into super--geniuses and learn the secrets of heredity if they would only live properly and keep a journal detailing every significant aspect of their lives. One branch of the family ended up in the Soviet Union, and at least a few of them continued to keep their journals and mail them off to the Wiley-Cooper family foundation in the United States. They emigrate to the United States in 1992, and the youngest member of the family (Anton, now Anthony) starts conducting research to cure migraines, to which many of his relatives, including Richard, are prone. Richard Wiley realizes that if Anthony wins the family prize, he will use his money to produce a medicine that provides temporary relief at the cost of the migraine patient’s future mental health. Richard wants to win the money to keep it out of Anthony’s hands.

The key to winning the prize somehow lies in the journals kept by Vladimir, a young schoolteacher (and member of the Wiley-Cooper clan) who died under mysterious circumstances. If Richard can just understand how Vladimir thought, the prize will be his. But as an old American man, he cannot be sure that he is reading Vladimir’s diaries correctly, and even Russians of Vladimir’s generation would fail, because they are now so much older than Vladimir was when he taught Russian literature to Soviet schoolchildren. Current twenty-something Russians would have a completely different frame of reference.

The solution? Pay a group of young Russians to live in a hotel under conditions that maximally reproduce the USSR of the 1970s, then have them read the same literary works Vladimir discussed in his journal. As a result, parts of Gorky Quest are the prose equivalent of a Seventies-themed Russian reality show, with much of the entertainment stemming from the young people’s shock at their strange living conditions.

After reading this novel twice, I am forced to admit that I still find the premise baffling, if not incomprehensible, at least on the level of plot. When Marinina talks about this book, she is most excited about discussing the differences between her generation (which came of age in the 1970s) and the young people of 2018. As research, she conducted focus groups with young Russians to get a sense of their perceptions of the world around them and claims that she came to truly value the younger generation. Young people today are different, she says, but still wonderful. This conclusion does not conflict with her characterization of her protagonists, who, like any group, consist of both charming and unlikable people. What, then, is the point of her exercise, and how does it differ from other fictional reconstructions of the Soviet past?

First and foremost, the young people’s reactions and the older characters’ reminiscences are meant to be entertaining. Many of them are the equivalent of US viral videos of Gen Z children baffled when they try to use a rotary phone, while others (such as the Komsomol meetings in which the young characters are forced to participate) are reminders of the hypocrisy and unpleasantness of late Soviet life. But Gorky Quest also expresses a naïve faith in the logic of generations and in the direct, simplistic relationship between a time period and the people who live in it. There is something inherently anti-novelistic about this belief, at least in Marinina’s case: why populate a fictional world with a variety of characters, all of whom have unique personalities, only to argue that environment shapes everyone in ultimately predictable ways?

Readers looking for a rosy-tinted view of the Soviet Seventies will be disappointed by the older characters’ repeated emphasis on the hypocrisy, senselessness, and inconvenience of the system in which they grew up (even if those same characters also can wax wistful when they recall those years). Marinina’s reconstructed 1970s are neither heaven nor hell, but merely different from the 2010s. Unlike Park of the Soviet Period, Gorky Quest’s reconstruction has little inherent drama to it; instead, the author’s emphasis on the everyday, prosaic aspects of her characters’ lives (one of the strengths of most of her writing) demystifies the return to the past. Where Park of the Soviet Period reproduces a past that seems to seep beyond its borders, and that at least some of its visitors and staff wish were actually real, Gorky Quest is more content to function like a theme park ought to: it’s a nice place to visit, but eventually, it is time to go home.

Camp Concentration

The most famous (or perhaps infamous) Soviet reconstruction is a project whose scope and scale are so vast that few of the scholars who write about it (myself included) have been able to view the entire thing. In 2005, the Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky began planning a film biography of the legendary Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau. Over the next several years, this project (called DAU after Landau’s nickname) grew into an unprecedented immersive, multimedia video and research project funded by the oligarch Sergei Adonyev. Khrzhanovsky built an entire institute, which operated between 2008 and 2011 at the site of a stadium in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. The largest film set in Europe, the DAU Institute was populated by hundreds of people from all walks of life, who committed to a total historical simulation twenty-four hours a day. As the project’s website describes it:

Scientists could live and work in the Institute and it was also populated by hundreds of carefully selected willing participants—artists, waiters, secret police, ordinary families—all cut off from time and space.

Several hundred people left their everyday lives to go back in time to the Soviet Union, taking up residence at the Institute in a spatially and temporally parallel universe. It was a meticulous historical simulation where everything, from uniforms to kitchen appliances, food, money, and vocabulary, matched the objects and habits of the time. The Institute had its own newspaper (with daily bulletins informing the participants of historical events from the time) and the currency used was the ruble. (“About DAU”)

Real-life physicists, mathematicians, and scientists of various profiles moved to the DAU Institute and even continued their research on the premises. Religious leaders and artists visited, including the renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic, the theater director Peter Sellars, and the composer and performer Brian Eno. Only four participants in the project were professional actors (playing Dau, his wife, their son, and Institute Director Krupitsa). Nearly everyone else acted under their own names, improvising their lines and subject to filming at any moment during the day or night.

By the time filming was over, the director had over seven hundred hours of footage as the source material for what had become much more than a single feature. As of July 2022, DAU consists of fifteen films and six series, with one of the films (Degeneration) clocking in at six hours and nine minutes. DAU debuted in Paris on January 25, 2019, as a series of screenings at two city theaters and an immersive experience at the Pompidou Center. Visitors to the Pompidou, who purchased “DAU visas” rather than ordinary tickets, could encounter members of the cast who were living at the center and remaining in character, much as they had on the Kharkiv set. Parts of the Pompidou were transformed into a “Soviet” space, including an apartment for the scientists who took part in the project.

Where Park of the Soviet Period turned the blurred boundaries between life and historical reenactment into the subject of fiction, and Gorky Quest portrayed a similar phenomenon as a quasi-sociological experiment, Khrzhanovsky’s totalizing ambitions disrupted the categories of “real” and “reenactment” for both its participants and its viewers (in the case of the latter, this worked primarily at the Paris installation, which obliged the visitors to become participants themselves).¹⁴ Unsurprisingly, DAU has also sparked serious ethical concerns that continue to be debated, mostly involving the people (and animals) who appear on screen. The numerous sex scenes were not simulated, and some of them depicted rape.¹⁵ To what extent was DAU enacting a complex sexual assault on some of the actresses? What about the involvement of children with Down Syndrome from a nearby orphanage—can they really be said to have consented to take part in this film, and was their treatment appropriate?¹⁶ Degeneration is a powerful statement about the triumph of fascists over intellectuals, but was it really necessary to invite Tesak, an actual neo-Nazi, to play one of the film’s murderous thugs?¹⁷ Or to have Tesak slaughter a pig in front of the DAU participants, on camera, leaving both the actors and the audience to watch it bleed out on a carpet?

DAU is a phenomenon that cannot escape discussions of the moral dimensions of art, and even its defenders (who dispute the allegations about the disabled children and the harmfulness of the simulated rapes) cannot reasonably assert that DAU is just “art for art’s sake.” A project that demands so much of its participants over so many years, requiring them to live in a compound and pretend to be in the Soviet Union, cannot be just a work of aesthetics. Going back at least as far as Plato’s Republic, philosophers and critics have debated the effects of artistic representation on readers and audiences (with The Republic, for example, assuming that the reader is a passive recipient easily led astray by a text’s bad example). One of the controversial aspects of Soviet nostalgia in general and Soviet reenactments in particular concerns the social role of representation: does nostalgic content produce politically nostalgic (if not reactionary) audiences? DAU turns representation into just one of at least three dimensions to consider, along with the function of the performers and of the active viewer/participant (at the Pompidou Center). What does it mean to be playing the role of a scientist if one is already a scientist, or a fascist if one is already a fascist? When the actors live versions of their own lives in the Soviet DAU research institute, what does this metaphorical time travel do to their own subjectivity?

DAU prompts these questions, but as one would expect from any complex work of art, particularly one as postmodern and slippery as this one, it does not provide definitive answers. Khrzhanovsky is a provocateur, and as a provocation, DAU is a huge success. As a meditation on historical reconstruction, DAU is effective less as a set of films than as the collection of controversies that the filming sparked. If one knew nothing of the project before viewing any of the DAU videos, the historical or sociological questions raised would be about the era represented and about the films’ fidelity to historical fact. But our knowledge of the three-year lifespan of the DAU Institute inevitably informs the viewing experience. Reception of the films is also reception of the making of the films, often boiling down to an ethical question: under the conditions that prevailed in Kharkiv, should these films even have been made at all? This is not a job for formalism or New Criticism but an invitation to explore context.¹⁸

The context of DAU is an object lesson about (restored) historical forms and their creation of a period-appropriate subjectivity. Part of this is clearly intentional. Why else would the participants have to forswear the Internet and wear Soviet underwear, if it were not to put them in the proper historical mindset? This not only prefigures Marinina’s faith in the power of historical forms to form predictable, period-specific consciousness in Gorky Quest, it practically weaponizes it. DAU is not just an exercise in implicit time travel; generically, the scene of DAU suggests a different fantastic genre: horror, or more specifically, the tale of the haunted house. Like a decaying manse whose ghosts possess visitors and make them act out dramas of long-ago suffering, the DAU set encouraged an identification with the spirits of the past. Accusations that Khrzhanovsky ran the set like a megalomaniacal tyrant are believable precisely because they so perfectly fit the historical/fictional framework. Of course, the director would be “possessed” by the spirit of a minor Stalin: the whole point of the project was to recreate these horrible times in miniature; not “socialism in one country” but “Stalinism on one film set.” This is method acting as horror story.

DAU was always vulnerable to the accusation that, in reconstructing the Soviet Union covering the period from 1938 to 1968, it was also replicating its flaws and excesses.¹⁹ It is an unrealizable monument to something that could not be realized, a perhaps unintentional echo of one of the most powerful critiques of the Stalinist project written when Stalinism was still in its early stages, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1930). Ostensibly the story of exhausted but mostly committed communist workers digging the foundation for a future “Proletarian Home” (a huge workers’ housing complex), by the end it becomes clear that all they have been doing is digging their own mass grave. The Proletarian Home is never built, while DAU mutated into a sprawling monster that virtually no one will see in its totality.

Does this make DAU a failure? Perhaps, but it is a failure that also constitutes an unprecedented success. The other restorationist projects discussed in this chapter are not just smaller in scale or ambition; they somehow manage to minimize and tame their subject matter. This is built into the premise of both Goodbye, Lenin! and The Man Who Couldn’t Die, which create the tiniest possible pseudosocialist habitats within the confines of two different bedrooms. Compared to the symphonic majesty of DAU, Becker’s and Slavnikova’s tales are chamber music. Marinina’s novel, while sprawling and interminable, also limits its faux Soviet Seventies to one house. Hardly a supporter of the Soviet system, Marinina still subjects her protagonists only to the mildest of indignities, while she is unable to resist the decade’s nostalgic charms. The various Parks of the Socialist Period defang and dehistoricize the Soviet Union in order to recreate it; granted, Zimin quickly finds the dark side of the theme park/resort where he is a guest, but only because he puts in the effort. The twentieth-century USSR in both Dark Side of the Moon and Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone are also reassuringly bland; ideology comes up in Dark Side, and the season-long exploration of this brave new world reveals a number of unappealing features, but ideology has been put on the back burner.

Like a Borgesian map that expands to the size of the territory it represents, DAU comes far closer to recreating a vanished USSR on former Soviet territory, while also, intentionally or not, enabling a critique of this very process of re-creation. The more Khrzhanovsky’s project focuses on minutiae (Soviet money, Soviet clothing, Soviet food, Soviet vocabulary), the more it manages to resemble both the USSR and a theme park simultaneously. An overly precious preoccupation with reproducing Soviet material culture coexists with both a system of institutionalized violence and all the petty ways people transgressed and found joy, or at least the illusion of agency. Finally, DAU, by virtue of its location, includes an element that rarely finds its way into other reenactments, reconstructions, and imaginary contemporary Soviet Unions: DAU is a colonial/imperialist project. While it is true that Landau taught in Kharkiv between 1932 and 1937, his Institute for Physical Problems was located in Moscow. The multiyear film set, however, was located in Kharkiv. Philip Cavendish points to Khrzhanovsky’s “weak cultural connections to Ukraine” and the fact that DAU is an example of what Yuri Shevchuk has called “cinematic depopulation as a variety of cultural imperialism.” Ivan Kozlenko goes further: “DAU is a fundamentally Russian project. It is a project on which is branded the entire history of Russia’s re-embrace of aggressive imperialistic instincts, one in which the function of the individual is purely instrumental.” For him, the positive reception of DAU in the Russian Federation is “a symptom of the complete ethical perversion of Russia’s cultural elite, which has become resistant to, and developed a tolerance for, extreme violence and the oppression of human rights.”

Constructing a Soviet film site in Kharkiv is not the cinematic equivalent of the Russian bombing and seizure of the same city eleven years later. To argue otherwise would downplay the massive suffering and loss of life that the 2022 invasion has caused. But the two events are on a continuum, even if they occupy very distant points from each other. Each was made possible by the cultural and imaginary persistence of an empire that officially ended in 1991. Russia’s war on Ukraine denies both Ukraine’s very existence and the imperialist nature of the invasion—how can it be imperialist to take back what was already “ours”?—while the film shoot in Kharkiv was made possible by the two countries’ proximity, similarity, and shared past that Russians tend to treat as either a positive or neutral fact, rather than the vexed legacy it brings to modern Ukraine. Nor should we forget that The Dark Side of the Moon’s contemporary Soviet Moscow was filmed in the other neighboring Slavic country, Belarus. Most of the Russian fantasies of a revived or persistent USSR we have examined are set on (and produced in) the territory of the Russian Federation. The imperialist implications of this fantasy are already evident in the implicit claim on post-Soviet territory, but they are even harder to ignore when the fantasy is produced in another sovereign country. The twentieth-century Soviet fantasy is more than just a set of variations on time travel and theme parks: it is the insistence on viewing Russian and former Soviet territory as a geographical palimpsest. Every stratum of history is still reachable; it is merely buried under other strata. The former Soviet Union as palimpsest is a revanchist political nightmare, as well as an affirmation that Philip K. Dick was right: the empire never really ended.

1. Despite numerous references to this headline, I have not been able to find the associated article. For a recent reference to it, see Chesnokov and Kashin.

2. Apparently, the original document has gone missing. Former Belarusian President Stanislav Shushkevich was told as much when he asked to see it in order to work on his memoirs (Parfitt). The Citizens of the USSR have not, to my knowledge, used this fact as evidence of the USSR’s continued existence, which strikes me as a missed opportunity.

3. Alik is referring to the proposed new, more flexible Union treaty that would have converted the USSR into the Union of Sovereign States.

4. The book would appear in English only in 2018.

5. Yekaterinburg is often assumed to be part of Siberia by people living in the Western part of Russia. But never say that to someone from Yekaterinburg (Filippov).

6. In this story, a time traveler to the prehistoric past accidentally steps on a butterfly, and when he returns home, his world has become a fascist dictatorship.

7. Calvert Cliffs is an actual nuclear power plant in our reality. It is possible that the brief shutdown of the plant on September 10, 2013, after a malfunction brought the plant to the producers’ attention ahead of the second season’s 2017 premiere.

8. Kinyaev is also a telekinetic who in his childhood was believed to be possessed by an evil spirit, though in fact he is possessed by the spirit of the Zone. Like all good executives, he multitasks.

9. In the interval between the first and second seasons, Vladimir Yankovsky directed a twenty-episode Ukrainian television series called Citizen Nobody (Grazhdanin Nikto), released in 2016. Set in Kyiv and filmed in Russian, Citizen Nobody tells the story of Maksim Orlov, a detective who wakes up after twenty-two years in a coma to find the USSR dismantled and Ukraine an independent country. Though every episode features at least one moment when Orlov is nonplussed by current mores and corruption, most of the series is simply a set of “cases of the week.” Like Solovyov in Dark Side of the Moon, Orlov faces complex challenges in his personal life. While he was comatose, his wife gave birth to their daughter and married his best friend. The resulting love triangle could have been the basis for a nuanced exploration of divided loyalties in an impossible situation, but instead it quickly descends into high melodrama: Masha, Orlov’s (ex-)wife had a nervous breakdown after his accident, and her current husband—who now turns out to be an evil, cynical mastermind—threatens to return her to the psych ward if she tries to run off with Orlov. Meanwhile, their somewhat wayward daughter Nastya is being courted by Orlov’s new young partner on the police force. The exploration of post-Soviet displacement is limited to Orlov’s laments about the downfall of the “honest” militia system from his Soviet days, along with a possible allegorical reading of the love triangle, in which the noble, Soviet Orlov fights his corrupt post-Soviet rival over Masha (the motherland) and Nastya (the future).

10. The Russian equivalent of “Gypsy” is what is used on the show. No effort is made in Russian to replace a term that is at best Orientalist and at worst a slur. Television shows such as The Dark Side of the Moon make no efforts to move away from anti-Roma stereotypes, so I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that “Gypsy” is a more appropriate translation.

11. Curiously, these refugees are fleeing from damage brought on by a tornado, which is not high on the list of natural disasters to which the region is prone.

12. One of Solovyov’s colleagues doesn’t watch that show, because he hates “science fiction.”

13. A key concept in this debate is Lipovetsky’s “post-sots,” which shares certain formal traits with postmodernism (particularly the recycling of socialist realist tropes) without the irony or self-consciousness that fuels most postmodern art (Postmodern Crises 169–94).

14. The experience of viewing DAU, at least in Paris, is ultimately as physical as it is aesthetic. As Tatyana Efremova writes: “DAU offered the viewers intense bodily immersion into the world of the past through activating their sensorium (smell and touch, as well as sound and vision) and radically blurring the boundary between the fantasy and the real. It also encouraged the spectators to build their own narrative of the event—to revisit their own memories and personal histories, to enjoy suggested encounters, or to choose one’s own experiences” (149). Or, as Il’ia Kukui puts it, “there was the sense that everything, literally everything in this project was created in order to subject the viewer to torture.”

15. The “real” sex performed by people playing fictional characters nonetheless manages to break the frame. As Iampol’skii notes, it’s a shock when Dau’s wife Nora has sex with her son Denis as the cleaning woman watches, and yet that shock leads to cognitive dissonance: “The sex on the screen is real, but the whole incest situation is simulated, and that’s quite clear.”

16. For a (mostly) English-language debate over these very issues, see the collection of seventeen scholarly reactions to DAU edited by Natascha Drubek et al. in the October 2020 issue of Apparatus.

17. Maxim Martinskevich, better known by the nickname Tesak (Hatchet), was a skinhead with several convictions for extremism. In addition to calling for all democrats to be put to death, he founded a vigilante organization that lured gay men to trysts, only to kidnap them and post videos of their torture online. He died in pretrial detention in 2020.

18. Here I agree with Lipovetsky, who writes, “Sadly, it is more interesting to talk about these films than to watch them: for me, this is proof of the experiment’s failure” (“Introduction,” 391).

19. See, for example, Robert Bird: “Though it purports to replicate Soviet experience, DAU really enacts the revenge of what Soviet discourse sublimated, at least in its public manifestations. As an aesthetic strategy, this eruption of what was previously suppressed is familiar from bleak late- and post-Soviet cinema (known in Russian as chernukha).”