Sleep to the Future
As fantasies go, the majority of Time Crasher stories are regressive. In sending the hero back through history, they combine nostalgia for a simpler or more heroic time with an implied or explicit critique of the present day. Mark Lipovetsky and Kirill Kobrin have pointed out that even the present has been an unpopular setting for much of post-Soviet literature, which seems to prefer the recent and distant historical past.
There are other reasons for their appeal, of course. A narrative sandwich of historical and science fiction, they hit an intergeneric sweet spot. The worldbuilding required by the author has the advantage of clarity: doing research on World War II might be daunting, but it does not require coming up with a whole new world from scratch.
More to the point: the first few post-Soviet decades have not made imagining the future easy. This is particularly a problem for the near future. What does it mean to project Russia into the 2030s or 2040s when it's all but impossible to imagine the simple fact of presidential succession, which always threatens to turn a political process into an existential question?
For whatever reasons, Time Crashers rarely end up in the future. Perhaps this is because they do not have a well-defined role to play in imagining the world to come. What possible mission could they be asked to accomplish that would be comparable to their typical role in stories based in the past?
Western science fiction has long provided an answer to this question, but it is usually based on a dystopian scenario. John Barlow, the protagonist of Cyril M. Kornbluth's 1951 "The Marching Morons," is a con man thawed out in a future world overrun by idiots who force the few intelligent people left to work on their behalf. Barlow uses his PR wiles to launch a scheme that tricks the morons into voluntarily signing up for mass extermination. The 1973 film Sleeper features Woody Allen as a jazz musician awakened to a tyrannical police state two hundred years in the future, so that he can help launch a revolution. And, of course, Mike Judge's 2006 Idiocracy, whose hero wakes up from a 500-year nap to discover a vapid and stupid America run by President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, took only a decade to start looking prophetic.
There is an appealing symmetry here with the Russian Time Crasher genre. Just as the Time Crashers endlessly recycle the conceit of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the accidental freezing and defrosting of a man from "our" time in the future recalls both Rip van Winkle and Edward Bellamy's classic 1888 utopia Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Contemporary Russian science fiction rarely avails itself of this trope, at least for tales set in the future. [1] Yuri Burnosov's "Moscow 22" is an exception, but its hero needs only an eight-year coma to awaken to a nightmare world in which everyone is forced to be gay.
Burnosov's vision of compulsory homosexuality is instructive, though perhaps not in the way the author intended. Utopias so often reflect the particular concerns of the times in which they were written. In the wake of the British Enclosure laws, Thomas More's Utopia spends more time talking about the allocation of agricultural lands than the average urban twenty-first-century reader might care to read. Burnosov needs the reaction of a "normal" contemporary to express outrage at what he clearly wants the reader to see as the inevitable outcome of tolerance run wild. [2] A Time Crasher ends up in the future because he bears a value or has an ability that will be lost, whether it be the rugged heroism of Buck Rogers or the unscrupulous genius of a Fifties con man.[3] There is a peculiar kind of positivity to these seemingly pessimistic scenarios, since they are predicated on the idea that our present has something to offer the future. This is the antithesis of the moral logic that catapults the protagonist out of the morally compromised present into the past for the purpose of spiritual improvement. Yet it is not the sort of imaginative leap that comes naturally to post-Soviet writers of fantasy and science fiction.
Notes
[1] Vladimir Voinovich brings the protagonist forward in time in his 1986 satire Moscow 2042 with the help of a West German trans-temporal travel agency, although he does include a thinly veiled parody of a cryogenically preserved Alexander Solzhenitsyn, revived in 2042 in order to try to bring back tsarism.
[2] A similar conceit can be found in two pro-Putin online commercials. In 2018, a middle-aged man dreams that, because people like him didn't bother to vote in the upcoming election, now families like his are required to host unattached gay men, and even share their beds with them. Two years later, another commercial shows a near future in which a young orphan boy is adopted by a gay male couple, one of whom says to call him "mama" before presenting him with a dress and make-up.
[3] Occasionally a writer will split the difference, sending someone from our past into our future. In his discussion of Stalingrad in contemporary Russian science fiction, Ian Garner highlights Oleg Tarugin and Aleksei Ivakin’s The Shtrafbat's Constellation: From Stalingrad to Alpha Centauri (2013), in which the "best soldiers in history" are brought from the 1940s to 2297, where they can bring the experience and spirit of Stalingrad to bear on the struggle against the lizard people who threaten to wipe out human civilization.