Soviet Antiquity
More and more,, the Soviet Union starts to resemble a lost civilization that can be rebuilt from its ruins, cloned, Jurassic Park style, from its amber-preserved DNA, or always present but barely visible, like one of Mieville’s unseen overlapping cities. The Jurassic Park metaphor is particularly powerful, giving rise to wordplay used by the film and a public art project “Soviet Park.” The coinage works much better in Russian. “Jurassic Park” is, literally, the “Park of the Jurassic Period,” which gives rise to “Park of the Soviet Period,” and, subsequently, the original Russian edition of Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of the Russian Leviathan (“Park of the Crimean Period”).
“Jurassic Park” may be the most dramatic of the temporal metaphors for the lost Soviet Union, but it still has a lot of company. Recent discussions of Soviet neoclassical architecture refer to a “Soviet antiquity,” while the notion of the Soviet Union as a variation on ancient Atlantis can be found across the political spectrum. [1] Eduard Limonov even published a poem and collection called “The USSR is Our Ancient Rome.” Yet the most remarkable thing about these metaphors is how unremarkable they seem: the Soviet Union was barely a decade gone before it started to be discussed as if it were Pompeii or the lost continent of Mu. Meanwhile, Anatoly Fomenko and the followers of his “New Chronology” were taking the opposite approach to history, arguing that ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt occurred during the Middle Ages.
What unites Soviet antiquity, the New Chronology, Other Russias, and the varieties of nostalgia and fandom is a voluntarist approach to nation, time, and geography. This is also the common thread to nearly all variety of Time Crasher stories, including the travels to the past discussed in the previous chapter. For the Time Crasher, every wardrobe is a potential portal to Narnia, every train station conceals a platform for the Hogwarts Express, and every nap could lead to awakening from a century-long slumber. Those Time Crashers who don’t end up fighting Nazis or preventing perestroika often find themselves in better worlds, or at least intriguingly different ones. One of the most popular fantasy series of the post-Soviet era, Max Frei’s Labryinths of Echo series, chronicles the light-hearted adventures of an unremarkable man (named Max Frei) who becomes a detective in an alternate world. Despite its propensity to spark just enough crime to keep Max’s department busy, the land of Echo stands out for its soft-pedaled hedonism. Max escapes to a world where good food, good company, and a surprising number of bathrooms per private home are the norm. The hero of Lukyanenko’s Rough Draft novels finds himself erased from his everyday Moscow existence, only to learn that he can travel to parallel earths, eventually taking on the task of interdimensional customs agent. Escapism is more than a description of the pleasures such books offer their readers; it is their literal subject matter.
Given such a wide range of alternatives, imagining a never-fallen or somehow restored Soviet Union might seem downright pedestrian. Yet the “reality” (such as it is) turns out to be much more complicated, both because the stakes are higher and because the imaginary world in question is so much closer to people’s lived experience. The demands for verisimilitude are that much greater, while the political implications are far more immediately obvious than those of, say, an alternative Russia where vampires and werewolves are real. A persistent USSR does not necessarily contravene the laws of physics, or even contradict the “laws” of history (as opposed to contradicting actual historical events). Just five years before the Soviet collapse, the end of the USSR seemed unthinkable rather than inevitable, and, if opinion polls over the last two decades are any indication, to a large majority of Russian citizens, it now looks regrettable. Brezhnev’s era of “Stagnation,” now reconceived as a lost age of harmony and economic health, was haunted by the unavailable temptations of Western consumerism (bluejeans, rock music, and so on); why not imagine a twenty-first century Soviet Union that made room for the Internet and smartphones, while still retaining the glory of a world class superpower?
Note
[1] Ilya Kalinin’s analysis of an underwater Soviet statue park is particularly evocative (Kalinin, “Soviet Atlantis: A Melancholy Fantasy of the Post-Soviet Subject” (Eurozine, November 22, 2019)