Hello, Stalin!
Chapter 1
History's Accidental Tourists
Hello, Stalin!
It's 1940, and a young pioneer named Vitya Solnyshkin has been given the rare honor of meeting with Joseph Stalin in the General Secretary's Kremlin office. Vitya quickly explains that he is not what he seems. He is, in fact, Viktor Egorovich Petrov, a 64-year-old retired construction worker whose consciousness abandoned his dying body in 2017 and somehow found itself housed in the form of a little boy three years before Petrov was born.
Curiously, Stalin is not at all surprised. When Vitya warns him of the impending German attack and advises him to execute such future traitors as young Borya Yeltsin and little Misha Gorbachev, Stalin is unmoved ("You really don't like third-graders, do you, Pioneer Solnyshkin?") . It's not that Stalin doesn't believe him; quite the contrary, he's heard it all before: "What do you think, that you're the only one? That you're unique? No one else has come to the past from the future before?"
Whether they found a time machine, were mysteriously transported due to a cataclysm or transmigrated like Vitya, time travelers have been giving Stalin advice for years now. And not just Stalin: as far back as Ivan the Terrible, records suggest that emissaries from the future have been paying visits to Russia's leaders. Stalin assumes his contemporaries Hitler and Roosevelt are getting their fair share of self-appointed twenty-first-century advisers, but none of it amounts to anything actionable. Everyone seems to have their own version of the historical timeline, and all their advice is conflicting. Stalin will send Vitya to join other travelers in a special research group in the Urals, but he is not planning on altering his decisions based on their input.
This story ("Vitya Solnyshkin and Joseph Stalin") is, of course, a parody of countless other tales of its kind: the stories of the Time Crashers, the accidental tourists who find themselves in another time, space, or dimension, usually for no apparent reason. Stalin is a popular figure in this genre, but here he plays an unusual role. Ordinarily, the traveler (most likely, from our time) is the primary point of reader identification, but here, it is Stalin who is the reader's stand-in. He's read too many of these stories before, and it's going to take more than an encounter with a prepubescent time traveling retiree to impress him.
"Vitya Solnyshkin and Joseph Stalin" does its best to demystify the genre while still invoking its usually mystical hand-waving (Viktor Petrovich ends up in Vitya's body by unexplained magic). The point is not that such travel is impossible, since the genre has never depended on convincing readers that such stories could happen. Instead, "Vitya Solnyshkin" demonstrates that the trip simply isn't worth taking. History has happened, and no amount of narcissistic fantasy about the hero's intervention is going to change anything. Nor is any individual story going to add much to the genre. We've seen it all before.
The Time Crashers are easy to parody, and "Vitya Solnyshkin" would be unlikely to stand out from the crowd were it not for its author, Sergey Lukyanenko. [1]
Note
The story was first published in the collection Lost Watch: The Best Fantastika of 2017 (Затерянный дозор). Though the book contains 16 different stories, it is Lukyanenko's name that is put in bold on the cover, along with an announcement of a new "Night Watch" story (Lukyanenko made two contributions to the collection).