The China Syndrome
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 had never lived to see.
While each alternate present gestures towards 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 a high standard of living in Chernobyl looks suspiciously un-Soviet. Dark Side still has variations on familiar consumer restrictions (batteries can only be purchased 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 One) and the fulfilled potential of Soviet science. Chernobyl has both a ruling Communist Part 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 Two, but spend most of it in the United States (and even there, they also jump further 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 red-head 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 One, rejoins them in Season Two 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 their original timeline. Both have overpriviliged gilded youth (in Season Two, it's the offspring of Party bigwigs); both have powerful security ministries to contend with, and, curiously, both have large corporations that are presumably private. Season Two's villain, Dmitry Kinyaev, is an American refugee child who grows up to run "GlobalKIntek," a sinister atomic energy company. [1] 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: it 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 Zoneoffers its viewers a Chinese model of avoiding the Soviet collapse: state capitalism with a communist face.
Note
[1] He 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.