Soviet Space: The Final Frontier
The most sustained effort at imagining a post-post-Soviet future for Russia is the USSR-2061 project, which I have referred to a few times in previous sections. Started by two young men on LIveJournal who go by the handles Archy13 and Felix, the USSR-2061 project was a reaction to the unrelenting pessimism its founders saw in then-contemporary science fiction; in one of their videos, they note that the year 2011, when they began the project, was dominated by zombies in film and video games, as well as talk about the Mayan calendar's alleged prediction that the world would end in 2012. as an inspiration for a more optimistic approach, they looked to the past: 2011 was the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering space flight. So they decided to fantasize about what life would be like on the 100th anniversary, in a future where the Soviet Union had at some point been restored.
Thus began an annual tradition: the announcement of a contest for best contributions on a given theme in a given format. Most of the competitions, including the inaugural, were for artwork. The theme was not just a Soviet future, or even a Soviet future in space, but artistic works that supported the project's tag line: "a future that you want to live to see" (do kotorogo khochetsia dozhit'). The first competition was devoted to the colonization of Mars, the second to the asteroid belt, followed by a contest to imagine the UAZ truck of the future, a contest commemorating the 30th anniversary of the hit science fiction film The Girl from the Future, and contests for designing Martian robots and imagining what vacations would be like in 50 years' time. They also conducted two short story competitions, which garnered hundreds of entries. The second competition was paid for by a very successful crowdfunding campaign on Boomstarter, with the winning entries collected in a book published by EKSMO (one of the biggest Russian publishers). The rest of the stories are also available online in eleven volumes of ebooks.
Archy13 and Felix found the art easier to judge, because it was less time-consuming than reading hundreds of stories. The results, however, are not particularly memorable. Ironically, a project whose founders have repeatedly insisted on their lack of interest in retrofuturism has yielded an astonishing amount of backwards-looking art (particularly in comparison to Carbongrad). . The general aesthetic is a combination of Soviet propaganda posters, American Golden Age science fiction cover art, video games and anime. So we have square-jawed cosmonauts, spaceships with Soviet symbols, girls whose outfits somehow combine the Komsomol and Japanese schoolgirl garb, serious people looking up at the sky, and robots. Lots and lots of robots.
Indeed, despite the video game influence, the robots remind us that most of this art was made as if cyberpunk never happened. USSR-2061 is analogue through and through, despite the fact that it is all created on computers and shared over social media. Even in the fiction, most of the technology involves heavy machinery and space travel. Some of this is dictated by the contests' themes, but the consistency with which the virtual and digital are ignored is worth considering. Even though Archy13 and Felix are adamant that they are not interested in alternate history, and that therefore the Soviet Union has to have collapsed in 1991 as part of the fictional background, the USSR-2061 remains rooted in 1961: this is a future that is less the continuation of our world than the sequel to the golden age of the Soviet space program. The result is a future that could only be more nostalgic if it had the Soviet music constantly playing in the background.
The stories and art of USSR-2061 remind us of the huge symbolic significance held by the space program, to an extent that NASA never matched. The Soviets were the first in space, both with Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin in 1961. As a response, John F. Kennedy famously committed America's resources to putting a man on the moon, an event that held the attention of the entire world. But soon NASA’s launches lost their luster (tedium punctuated only by horrible tragedies, such as the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion). Going to the moon the first time was romantic; going for the third was routine. And eventually the pictures sent back from rockets and space shuttles paled in comparison to science fiction films, thanks to the huge strides made in special effects and computer graphics in the 1970s and 1980s. But NASA's declining prestige was also the result of choices made by the government, choices that involved not just finances, but public relations.
After the 1960s, the U.S. government made little effort to excite Americans about the space program, while the Soviet Union never stopped using Gagarin as a point of pride. The Soviet space program was the logical evolution of the USSR's decades long-romance with science and flight. Under Stalin, aviators were national heroes; the pilots who seemed to defy the laws of gravity exemplified the Soviet progressive ethos. With the space program, the Soviet Union could lay claim not just to scientific progress, but to the broader universe, and, by extension, the future. If, as the Stalin-era song puts it, Soviet citizens were born to "turn fairy tales into real life," then the space program would do the same for science fiction.
Gagarin remained a national hero long after his flight into space. Even in the last Soviet years, his image was on posters and postage stamps, and people still told jokes playing off of the famous word he said before takeoff ("Poexali" (Let's go!). Though undoubtedly the product of numerous political choices and motivated at least in part by a desire to show the rest of the world how powerful Soviet science was, the space program, along with the Soviet victory over the Nazis, was one of the few national accomplishments of which everyone was proud, regardless of political convictions. Cosmonauts were heroes, pure and simple.
After the Soviet collapse, the space program fell on hard times. Disconnected both from everyday reality and the priorities of the new Russian state, the Soviet cosmonauts were the leftovers of a vanished world. Veteran Cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Alexander Volkov were on the Mir Space Station when the Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 26, 1991. Their return was postponed because the Baikonur landing area was located in the now independent country of Kazakhstan. This odd story earned Krikalev the sobriquet of the "Last Soviet Citizen.' Krikalev had already been on the station long before Volkov arrived, when they finally landed, Krikalev had spent twice as much time in space than originally planned, and time dilation meant that he was now .02 seconds younger than everyone who was born on Earth at the same time as him. Once a harbinger of the future, now the cosmonaut was a man who was literally from another country and another time.
It is fitting, then, that the imaginary relaunch of the Soviet Union be predicated on multiple rocket launches into space. The entries submitted to the contest varied in their pre-histories of the new USSR, and even in their geography. Sometimes the USSR was reborn within its old borders, sometimes on a smaller scale, and sometimes as a global empire. But these geographies turn out to matter far less than the infinite scale afforded by space. It's not simply a matter of colonization, though that definitely plays a role (and since the time of Bogdanov's novel Red Star, who can resist the chance to turn Mars communist?). The symbolic geography of the Soviet Union always had a strong vertical component, from the aforementioned aviators to the cosmonauts. The contest's conditions reversed the temporality of Soviet history (or at least the history of the original Soviet Union). Now, the Soviet Union 2.0 arises on Earth as a function of the demand to describe Soviet outer space. The Soviet Union was always as much an idea as a place, and, now, in its resurrection, the idea (and the ideal) comes first. Nostalgia for the USSR tends to involve a desire for a return to "greatness;" the USSR-2061 starts with greatness and builds from there. By choosing the space program as a starting point, the USSR-2061 develops a model of revanchist greatness that is considerably less hysterical than the much more prominent alternative: the countless stories returning to or reenacting World War II discussed in previous chapters.