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 (Premier Savrasov declares that there is "no such thing as an-ex citizen of the USSR"). [1] 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 "Big Brother." 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 Two 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 given a check, and a terrible boss who encourage a subordinate to jump out the office window to his death. [2] Moscow audiences flock to a musical called "My Fair American," about an ignorant girl from the former USA trying to learn how to act and speak Soviet.
And, really, who wouldn't want a Soviet life in the world of Season Two? 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 only be bought three 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 more petty.
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 shall 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 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."
Notes
[1] 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.
[2] One of Solovyov's colleagues doesn't watch that show, because he hates "science fiction."