Communist Post-Apocalyptic Film

The dogged band of survivors in the aftermath of apocalypse – whether alien attack, environmental disaster, nuclear war, or worldwide pandemic virus – has become a preoccupation of science fiction, especially since World War Two and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Developing from H.G. Wells’ visionary The Shape of Things to Come, filmed in 1936 by William Cameron Menzies, the theme has proliferated in the post-War years, becoming a sub-genre in its own right; notable novels and film adaptations range from On the Beach and I Am Legend (filmed as The Omega Man) in the 1950s, through The Day of the Triffids, to the contemporary 28 Days Later and The Road. In the distinctive Eastern European version of the post-apocalyptic film, at its peak between the 1960s to the decline of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the last representatives of humanity are typically corrupt, cynical, disillusioned, and dishonest – the nobler qualities having vanished in the struggle for survival. The bleakest examples portray the ragged remnants of mankind, often diseased or mutated, reduced to scavenging among the post-industrial ruins, occasionally emerging from improvised shelters to salvage a few precious relics of civilisation – from libraries, museums, and schools. As they gather in claustrophobic and spartan enclaves waiting for the inevitable end, there is a stark contrast with the initial optimism which followed the October Revolution of 1917. 

In the early years of Soviet rule, the Bolsheviks actively encouraged the population to look forward to the expansion of Communism, spreading a Utopian message both on earth (‘world revolution’) and into the cosmos. The Party enlisted artists to promote their vision in state-sanctioned productions, notably the film Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), itself preceded by leading Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 novel Red Star, which effectively transplanted Marxism to Mars. That expansive mood had long since been dissipated; firstly by the dictates of ‘socialist realism’, aggressively promoted under Stalin, which disdained science fiction in favour of heroic portraits of the Soviet workers’ struggle, and later by economic stagnation and social decay, Cold War paranoia and pessimism. The 1966 Czech film The End of August at the Hotel Ozone depicts a group of virtually feral female survivors wandering the desolate countryside, anticipating a bleak, cruel and violent future. 1985’s O-Bi O-Ba (subtitled The End of Civilisation) by Polish writer/director Piotr Szulkin, is set in a particularly grim underground bunker, whose inhabitants endure a hopeless wait for a new Ark. Both represent a widespread disillusionment with the project of international Communism, and express subtle dissent against the central control exerted by Moscow over its satellite nations of the Eastern Bloc.

 

Above: Poster for Aelita

Right: Poster for Voyage to Mars

Though still closely overseen by the state after the death of Stalin, film-makers, artists and writers were able – often avoiding censorship by using science fiction as a metaphor – to articulate these fears. In 1972, Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky filmed Solaris, based on Stanislav Lem’s novel, set on a near-deserted, distant space station; a meditation on an aborted mission which paralleled the abandonment of the space programme. With the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s historic orbital flight four years later, there had been a brief rush to glorify the triumphs of the cosmonauts; after the American moon landing of 1969 effectively marked the end of the space race, the focus largely shifted from the conquest of the stars to the struggle for survival on an ailing earth. 

Tarkovsky returned to science fiction themes in 1979’s Stalker, adapted from the novel Roadside Picnic by the brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future considers Roadside Picnic in terms of problematic or ‘failed’ Utopias, with professional scavengers, or ‘stalkers’, entering the Zones (sites of alien visitation, now sealed by the authorities) in search of bounty, though they run the risk of encountering inexplicable dangers and death. As it transpired, the filming locations close to the Estonian capital Tallinn proved deadly; an abandoned electrical generating station and the Jägala River, polluted by an upstream chemical works were linked to the early deaths from bronchial cancer of Tarkovsky, his wife Larisa, and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn. The Zone, mysterious centre-piece of book and film, was not only the name later applied to the contaminated area of exclusion around Chernobyl but, as James Norton noted in an article for Vertigo magazine, ‘Stalking the Stalker’, “was also the term by which the Gulag was known, as the Russian audience would have recognised.” 

Location map for Stalker

 The loose trilogy of post-apocalypse nightmares by Tarkovsky’s protégé Konstantin Lopuchansky – Letters from a Dead Man, Visitor to a Museum, and The Ugly Swans (another adaptation of a novel by the Strugatsky brothers) – focus unflinchingly on the decline of the Communist dream. This trio of films, the first two made in the later 1980s, are alike set in landscapes blighted by industrial pollution, radiation fall-out, and toxic waste, resulting in mental illness and physical mutations. These futuristic visions were thinly-veiled echoes of a catastrophic reality; the 2016 documentary City-40, exposing the once-hidden ecological devastation in one of the Soviet Union’s uranium-processing ‘closed cities’, was part of a gradual process revealing the extent of environmental destruction. Just as the locations of Stalker offered a haunting precursor of tragic things to come, the ravaged nuclear fall-out setting of Letters from a Dead Man pre-figured the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in the same year as the film’s release, 1986. Combined with an escalating arms race between the USA and USSR, which by the 1980s threatened to become a full-blown conflict, world-wide apocalypse no longer seemed a film-maker’s fanciful notion.

An Appendix to Structures of Soviet Science Fiction: Visitor to a Museum

Following the previous feature, which touched on the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker and its parallels with the ‘zone of exclusion’ created by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the 28^th Leeds International Film Festival has screened two Soviet films which can be considered in the same light. Both were written and directed by Konstantin Lopuchansky, who worked as an assistant on Stalker, and both deal with post-apocalyptic environments. Lopuchansky’s screenplay for the first of these, Letters from a Dead Man (1986), was written in collaboration with Soviet authors Vladimir Rybakov and Boris Strugatsky. The film depicts the aftermath of nuclear meltdown, a golden-tinted world of ‘perpetual twilight’ where a scholar, holed up in a makeshift shelter, copes with the devastation around him by writing and reciting letters to his son, who is presumed dead.

 

Posters for Letters from a Dead Man and Visitor to a Museum,

from 'The Apocalypse Quartet of Konstantin Lopushansky' at www.fright.com

 

The second, Visitor to a Museum (1989), has even been interpreted as a sequel of sorts to Stalker. Its main character travels through a vividly portrayed nightmarish wasteland (literally – it appears to be one vast rubbish dump) on a journey to visit the Museum of the title, which lies submerged under rising flood waters and can only be reached at low tide. In this blighted landscape, an underclass of mutated humans, known as Degenerates, are confined to reservations, where they persist in primitive forms of worship – their sole prayer is “let us out of here”. The central protagonist is disturbed by their plight and fascinated by their religious customs, later seemingly being adopted by them as a Messiah before continuing on his mission as a form of spiritual quest. The latter part of the film is particularly hallucinatory and harrowing; the ‘hero’ reaches the Museum, only to find that it is nothing more than a bleak island of ruins amidst the toxic sea. These evocations of a decayed civilisation, environmental ruin and social collapse are vividly portrayed throughout – a truly dystopian vision created at the very end of the era of Soviet Communism. 

Structures of Soviet Science Fiction (II)

While the art-work of Ilya Kabakov (discussed in Part I) documents the decline of the Soviet Space Age, further evidence of this ongoing process is abundant in modern-day Russia. A visit to the Space Museum in Moscow in the early years of the twenty-first century confirmed the distance between the heroic feats of Gagarin and his fellow cosmic pioneers, mythologised in Soviet propaganda, and the true state of affairs in the post-Communist era. The dingy gallery of space junk had its own charm, with its obsolete hardware and the space-suited dogs Belka and Strelka who fell to earth, alive, complete with their clear spherical helmets. Signs of neglect were evident in this main gallery; though perhaps the dim illumination of the gloomy chamber was for conservation purposes, rather than cost-cutting, the Museum offered little in the way of either customer service or exhibition interpretation. It all seemed very distant from the smiling Cosmonauts gazing skyward, in anticipation of conquering the heavens.

On the paved space above the Museum-bunker stands the imposing metallic Space Monument, thrusting toward the stars; it is surrounded by the Pavilions of the VDNKh – the former All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievements – a showcase of planned-economy productivity. In the vast interior spaces where once the achievements of the mighty State in all spheres of science and industry were proudly displayed, the void is now filled by market stalls selling competitively-priced consumer goods; as in the Museum, rockets, satellites and even space capsules are mere theme-park sideshows. Thus the vanished Soviet utopian dream, a gleaming, technologically-advanced future, has left behind a faded splendour. The derelict worlds of futuristic entropy portrayed in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1970s films Solaris and especially Stalker (both based on sf novels by eastern European authors), documents from the years of stagnation before Communism’s terminal collapse, begin to look painfully prophetic. The whole Exhibition complex, evidently still a popular attraction, appeared run-down to western eyes, in a state of decay and dilapidation, slowly becoming overgrown; the subsequent refurbishment of the Space Museum was, in truth, long overdue.

Above: Belka & Strelka in the Space Museum
Right: The Space Monument

Artists Jane and Louise Wilson, sisters from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, are among those to have investigated the relics of the Soviet Space Age, notably with their installation piece, Star City (2000), filmed at the formerly secret Cosmonaut training base outside Moscow, Zvyozdny Gorodok (translated literally as ‘Starry Town’). Once a source of Soviet pride, the facility has only survived into the twenty-first century by embracing space tourism and western capital. The Wilson sisters have also engaged with another, grimmer aspect of the Soviet legacy in their 2012 film The Toxic Camera. Taking as its subject the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, and the subsequent deadly toxic fall-out, it utilises contemporary footage taken at the scene by Soviet film-maker Vladimir Shevchenko, who later died due to the radiation he was exposed to there. In the Wilsons’ photographic series, Atomgrad, haunting images of the city of Pripyat, abandoned in the wake of the disaster, evoke the wider damage of state-sponsored environmental pollution and the dystopian high-rise collective housing estates which dominate the urban landscape, from the suburbs of the capital to the towns of the provinces.

The central concept of the novel Roadside Picnic by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Soviet science fiction writers, which was filmed as Stalker, is ‘The Zone’; in book and film this is a sealed-off area once visited by extra-terrestrial life, where earth’s physical laws no longer apply and strange things occur. Later the term was also applied to another zone of exclusion – the irradiated region around Chernobyl, marking the limits of human habitation after the disaster. The parallels between the fictional post-apocalyptic ‘Zone’ and the all-too-real one between Belarus and Ukraine are reflected in the growth of ‘anti-tourism’, with increased visitors to the area in recent years. This has also given rise to its further use as a set for a virtual gaming environment, with scenes based on photography taken in the actual physical location. 

Hotel Cosmos

The superficial brilliance of contemporary Moscow, represented as a resurgent, shiny megalopolis of gangsters, oligarchs and pop stars in the blockbuster films Night and Day Watch (2004 and 2006, both based loosely on Sergei Lukyanenko’s novel The Night Watch) suggests another (science-) fictional world, embodied by their use of the strikingly futuristic Hotel Cosmos, itself overlooking the Exhibition grounds and Space Museum, as a pivotal location. Where those films echoed a popular image of the capital’s prosperity, rapid development and regeneration – capturing a narrative that President Putin’s regime is also keen to present to the West – much of post-Communist Russia is broken-down, worn-out, and facing an uncertain future. The past continues to cast a long shadow, even if the revolutionary rhetoric of a technologically-enabled utopia, embedded in the Soviet Union from its inception with its egalitarian society, space-flight complexes and optimistic dreams of conquering the cosmos, now belongs to a vanished world, and its monuments to the glorious future have long since become rusting remnants of that distant era.