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.

Red Star Gazing and the Inevitability of Full Space Communism

Part Two

Under Stalin, what remained of the Soviet communist dream turned into a nightmare of international proportions. Nevertheless, many people outside of the USSR in the 30s, even anti-Stalinist communists who managed to avoid being murdered by the GPU, went along with Trotsky’s formulation in 1936 that 'socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface-not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity'. In other words, the productive capacity of the supposedly socialist Soviet Union was sufficient justification for its existence. When this system was belatedly mobilised for the fight against Nazism, those who still dreamed of a communist future were further comforted that there remained something to be said for the USSR’s 'socialism'. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate provide novelistic depictions of how believers in very different contexts convinced themselves that the sacrifices required by this system were worthwhile.

The twin shocks of Khrushchev’s 'secret speech' and the bloody suppression of the Hungary uprising in 1956 put paid to such illusions in the West and gave birth to the so-called New Left. This created a space for a questioning of the determinist Marxism that had until then been given a free pass on the left (except in isolated and disparate cases), and which held that technological advance = progress = creating the conditions for socialism. This led to a re-evaluation (particularly among English new-left historians) of such awkwardly un-scientific tendencies as 19th century utopian socialism, 17th century millenarian proto-communism and Luddism. However, while the de-Stalinisation of the left in the West led, in many cases, to a rejection of technological determinism and laid the ground for the rise of CND and the green movement, this historical conjuncture gave technological determinism a new lease of life in the Soviet Union. In an echo of Trotsky’s logic, the Soviet Union would have to justify the horrors of the Stalinist era by delivering on the techno-utopian dream that had seemingly been side-lined along with constructivism and the abandonment of the revolution’s internationalism.

Francis Spufford takes this post-Stalin Soviet panorama as the backdrop of his novelised history book Red Plenty. In it, he has Khrushchev musing on the current situation of the USSR: 'fortunately, the hard part of the task was nearly done. They had almost completed the heavy lifting, they had heaved and shoved and (yes) driven people on with kicks and curses, and they had built the basis for the good life, their very own horn of plenty', and translates him as claiming in 1959 that 'in our day, the dreams mankind cherished for ages, dreams expressed in fairytales which seemed sheer fantasy, are being translated into fantasy by man’s own hands'. Of course, the utopian dreams of the planned economy were rather more prosaic than the electrifying explosion of creativity that might have been heralded by world soviet revolution in 1917-21. Nevertheless, in the context of the space race, they did provide a boost to the Soviet sci-fi imagination, as the the Soviet images featured on io9 and Dark Roasted Blend attest.

From Tekhnika Molodezhi journal

While the illustrations here don’t have the eerie parallel universe feel that art and sci-fi had in the Russian Revolution’s heroic period, they still pack a punch, particularly the depiction of the communal living space under the surface of the moon from the journal Tekhnika Molodezhi, whose on-line archive is available here: http://zhurnalko.net/journal-2

Red Star Gazing and the Inevitability of Full Space Communism

Part One

Russian revolutionary interest in science fiction was inevitably bound up with the trajectory of the Russian revolution itself. The veteran Bolshevik and intermittent opponent of Lenin, Alexander Bogdanov, wrote a pioneering novel on space travel in 1908, in the aftermath of the famously incomplete revolutionary upheavals of 1905. Red Star relates the story of a Russian revolutionary who travels to Mars with an alien agent to learn about how the Martians organise their society along communist lines. In 1924, the movie Aelita, Queen of Mars flipped the script, relating the tale of a Russian Civil War veteran and an astronomer who travel to Mars to aid a revolutionary uprising. Clearly, much had happened in Russia to change the parameters of how science fiction might be imagined in the preceding years. Russians were no longer apprentices but masters and teachers of the revolutionary act. Nevertheless, both Red Star and Aelita emerged at moments in Russian history when revolutionary enthusiasm and optimism were on the wane. Was this a case of red-tinted telescopes turning away from the reality of reaction on terra firma and up to the stars, where a more comforting reality might be imagined?

Poster for Aelita in Russian (1924)

Aelita, Queen of Mars is particularly notable for Aleksandra Ekster’s striking constructivist set design. By the early 1920s, a combination of industrial devastation and political pressure had left constructivism somewhat marginalised in Soviet society. In the face of increasing state control of politics and culture, and the reversal of ‘war communism’, signalled by the introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy), the utopian impulse that had envisioned the categories of art and architecture dissolving themselves and becoming part of everyday socialist life was in decline. By the time of the release of Aelita, the dystopian science fiction novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin had been banned, while Bogdanov had been arrested by the GPU (although he was released after 5 weeks). The cinematic achievement of Aelita, Queen of Mars was illustrative of the Soviet Union’s continued cultural vibrancy, and the inspirational impact of constructivism on Soviet film, but it also indicated the way in which constructivism was being shunted to the side-lines. Other big names of constructivism, including Aleksandr Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers, would become involved in film poster and set design in the 1920s as opportunities for Soviet construction dried up.

Aelita, Queen of Mars also shows how, in the context of gerrymandered soviet elections, secret police crack-downs and the failure of the German revolution, communists had to look to the stars to imagine the realisation of their utopia. A similar impulse can be detected in Alexandra Kollontai’s hopeful yet escapist utopian fragment, Soon.

The Soviet sci-fi vision would become more influenced by dystopian imaginings of the horrors of chemical warfare in the following years. Whether the post-war ‘return to the future’ in the context of the space race represented a re-emergence of political sci-fi utopianism will be the subject of Part Two.

Soviet Dystopia: We

This year sees the ninetieth anniversary of the first publication in English of Evgenii Zamiatin’s seminal dystopian novel, We (Russian Mы/My). Pre-dating, and possibly influencing, the two major depictions of all-powerful state control in twentieth-century English literature, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it is undoubtedly the least well-known of the three. In part this stems from its troubled publishing history; written in 1920-21, We was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988, though its reputation in the west has continued to grow with the years.

First Edition, 1924

Various copies, including some from University of Leeds Library

With the Bolsheviks having only just secured power, Soviet authorities took a predictably dim view of Zamiatin’s prescient portrayal of totalitarian rule, set in the ‘OneState’ of the twenty-sixth century and narrated by citizen D-503. Its absolute ruler is the Benefactor; every aspect of life is timetabled, from work schedules to ‘Personal Hours’, and the buildings are constructed almost entirely of glass, to allow for constant state surveillance. Given the emphasis on the collective in the imagined OneState, and also its themes of conformity and psychological confinement, We can be read as a reflection of Zamiatin’s fears for the future after the Russian Revolution of 1917. This seems to have been the interpretation of the literary censors, who immediately banned it, the first book to suffer this fate in the Soviet Union; the novel was finally published in the USA, by E. P. Dutton in New York in 1924. In fact, Zamiatin (a naval engineer by profession) also took inspiration from a period spent working in the ship-yards of Tyneside, where he supervised the construction of ice-breakers. We reflects the contemporary trend toward the mechanisation of labour and ‘scientific management’, notably the time-and-motion studies of efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, that the author first observed in the UK. Clarence Brown, translator of a later English edition, comments that:

“characters behave as nearly as possible as if they themselves were fail-safe pieces of hardware.”

After the banning of We, and with cultural life suffering from the same authoritarian clampdown as the rest of Soviet society, Zamiatin, possibly fearing the purges which were to come, wrote directly to Stalin, asking to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union and pursue his artistic freedom elsewhere. Remarkably, his plea succeeded, and in 1931, he left the country. Though his exile was to Paris, rather than Siberia like so many of his literary colleagues and peers, he barely wrote again and died, by all accounts disillusioned and impoverished, in 1937.