Building Communism through Time Travel
Both The Man Who Couldn't Die and Goodbye, Lenin! are thought experiments: how could we pretend that what Ken Jowitt called the "Leninist Extinction" never happened? The falsification, however far-fetched, remains within the bounds of the technically possible, which is one of the reasons that it is doomed to fail. The limits of realism, however, are no match for tropes of science fiction. A present-day Soviet Union is as credible an alternate history scenario as Hitler winning World War II, but the most prominent examples are from a genre we have already looked at great length. This is a job for Time Crashers.
Preventing the downfall of the USSR was the main goal of the time-traveling Natasha in Arsenyev's Student, Komsomol Girl, Athlete, but Natasha has to die to make it happen. Only in the novel's brief epilogue do we get a glimpse of twenty-first-century Soviet life; while the other stories in the collection propose a joint Soviet/Nazi empire to ensure a radiant future. We get a fuller vision of today's Soviet Union on the two television series that brought the Time Crasher genre to the small screen: The Dark Side of the Moon and Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone (Чернобыль: Зона отчуждения).
The first season of The Dark Side of the Moon was analyzed at some length in Chapter One as an example of a Time Crasher ending up in the Soviet Past; the second and final season returns its hero to a 2011 that, thanks to Solovyov's actions in 1979, is dominated by a technologically advanced and largely benevolent USSR. The second season aired in 2016, four years after the first. At 16 hour-length episodes, Season Two is one of the most extensive presentations of a persistent Soviet Union ever produced.
Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone, though populated by very different characters from those of The Dark Side of the Moon and revolving around the Chernobyl disaster, oddly mirrors its predecessor. The show began broadcasting its first season in October of 2014, and was such a hit that it was succeeded by a second season three years later, and concluded in 2019 in a series of three television films that told a single story from different angles, with different endings in each film.
Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone centers around a group of teenage characters who seem designed to remind older viewers why they hate teenagers. The plot is set in motion by Igor’ Mateveev, a particularly unsavory young man who, pretending to be emergency tech support, steals the cash that the parents of Pasha, the de facto leader of his friends group, had set aside for purchasing a new apartment. Igor is on his way to Chernobyl, and the friends follow him by subscribing to his video podcast, in which he describes his travels at the same time that he demonstrates the rapid decline of his mental equilibrium. One of Pasha’s friends, Anna, lost her older sister in Pripyat’ right before the disaster, so the trip takes on a personal significance for her. The upshot is: the group travels back in time to the day before the disaster, averts it, and then, in season 2, find themselves back in the present, but in an alternate future in which a nuclear disaster in Pennsylvania led to the collapse of the United States, while the USSR has managed to live long and prosper. In the the final three movies, they fight and defeat the malign mystical forces that had been toying with them from the start.
Each of these series features an involuntary trip to the past: 1979 for Dark Side, and 1986 for Chernobyl. In the latter series, the trip takes place only toward the end of the first season, but the stakes are obviously higher: the teenagers are traveling to one of the most significant, and deadly, moments of late Soviet history. Where Chernobyl's focus on crisis is obvious in its very name, Dark Side invites its viewers to join Solovyov on a journey to a time defined by crisis' opposite: stability, stagnation, and order. The historical change wrought by Solovyov is easily explained by the Butterfly effect, helpfully and clumsily introduced in the second season's first episode by the hero's random encounter with a little boy reading Ray Bradbury's short story "The Sound of Thunder." [1]
Nevertheless, each series incorporates a state-destroying crisis into its alternate present, one explicitly, the other more vaguely. In both Chernobyl and Dark Side, the USSR is flourishing, but the USA has collapsed. Chernobyl appears to be governed by a law of conservation of disaster. Thanks to the teens' intervention at the end of Season One, the Chernobyl reactor does not melt down, but, for reasons that are never made clear, on August 7, 1986, the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant near Lusby, Maryland melts down instead. [2] Since the entire plot of the series revolves around the mystical consequences of nuclear disaster, the American nuclear accident serves as the impetus for moving most of the series' action from the USSR to the Divided States of America (Raz"edeniennnye shtaty Ameriki). As a result, the viewers' exposure to the twenty-first century Soviet Union is rather brief.
In Dark Side, the United States are also in chaos, with would-be refugees desperate to immigrate to the USSR. Unfortunately, any American visitors who might think of staying the the Soviet Union have been chipped by the U.S. Embassy, and unless they can get access to a technology called a "Russifier" ("russifikator"), they will die. As for the USSR, it has expanded from 15 to more than two dozen constituent Soviet Socialist Republics, and is a global economic and technological leader.
One might ask: why does the fantasy of a persistent Soviet Union seem to necessitate the collapse of the United States? But an even better question might be: what does it mean to ask this question, and what does it mean not to? Chernobyl, at least, implicitly acknowledges the role of the USSR's internal problems; in both the USSR and the alternate USA, nuclear meltdowns kickstart the state's disintegration. But framing the collapse of a global superpower as a zero sum game in these two works implies a theory behind the downfall of the USSR. If the Soviet Union truly fell apart on its own, then there is no need to imagine its survival would have such an effect on the United States. The complementary distribution of civilization collapse means something quite different: the end of the USSR is understood as a defeat in its conflict with its American rival. Two things are at work here: first, the persistence not only of the USSR, but of the Cold War framework that died with it, and second, the transformation of what was once a fringe conspiracy theory into something close to common knowledge. The USSR did not fall; it was pushed, by a vast network of American espionage and subversive influence, possibly even including Gorbachev as an American gent of influence.
Even without this conspiratorial framework, imagining the destruction of the United States has its own appeal. After years of humiliation, not to mention highhanded treatment on the part of the US and its allies, watching the United States suffer the Soviet Union's fate has to be intensely gratifying.
Notes
[1] In this story, a time traveler to the prehistoric past accidentally steps on a butterfly, and when he returns home his world is now a fascist dictatorship.
[2] Calvert Cliffs is an actually existing nuclear power plant in our reality. It is possible that the brief shutdown of the plant on September 10, 2013, after a malfunction brought the plant to the producers' attention ahead of the second season's 2017 premiere.