Sovpunk, Indirectly
Depending on just how online one is, Sovpunk is either a marginal phenomenon that sounds vaguely familiar or a useful term for a style that is all over the Internet, but is only just taking shape as a primarily visual trend. Also called "Sovietpunk," the word usually refers to the deployment of Soviet aesthetic signifiers in futuristic or apocalyptic settings.
The term jumped the species barrier from online chatter to highbrow fiction with the publication of Aleksei Salnikov's book Indirectly (Oposredovanno) (2018/2019). [1] Indirectly is the third novel by this Ekaterinburg-based author, whose star has been steadily rising. His second novel, The Petrovs in and around the Flu, was awarded two of Russia's most prestigious literary prizes in 2018 (NOS and the National Bestseller), adapted for the stage twice, and made into a film by leading director Kirill Serebrennikov (2021). While I have no statistics on readership, it is safe to say that a new release by Salnikov is guaranteed attention from Russian intellectuals.
Indirectly gets to the idea of Sovpunk...indirectly. The novel is set in an alternate world that is fundamentally the same as ours, but with one major distinction: poems are considered a narcotic. The book's last chapter features a conversation with one of the supporting characters, Dmitry, a writer who another character claims has recently given up the fantasy (fentezi) genre to which he had dedicated his career. But Dmitry explains that he has not given up on fantasy at all:
It's just that one day I was reading one of our contemporary classics and suddenly realized that they're writing fantasy, just like me. It's just the genre hasn't been named yet; to myself, I've been calling it 'sovpunk;' that is, there's cyberpunk, steampunk and in Russia we now have the sovpunk genre, and not only in Russia. There's light sovpunk, which borrows the Odessa film studio aesthetic whole cloth; there's dark sovpunk, which is dominant, and it's the basis for a whole host of things, like a gross political officer harassing a lady, bullying her family one after another, and then its payback time, or he bullies an engineer out of envy, does something awful, then there's the barking of the Gulag German shepherds... People just put their heroes in this prefab scenery and use these plots, moving between the camps, the factory [...] the communal apartment and the party meeting, an endless board game, where you already know what the book is, because it's like the Conan series, which has had shitloads of sequels slapped onto it. [..] There are lots of subgenres, like soft sovpunk without camps, but with some intellectual's travails, and he's surrounded by such thugs, such thugs!
Presumably Salnikov got the word "sovpunk" from the Internet, in which case his distortion of the term is probably willful. Salnikov's comparison of sovpunk to steampunk and cyberpunk makes sense, but it is clear that he is interpreting them all primarily as historically-inflected styles: if it looks Victorian, its steampunk, if it looks futuristic, it's cyberpunk, and if it looks Soviet, it's Sovpunk. Salnikov's Sovpunk is the opposite of the phenomenon as it's generally understood. Rather than taking place in the present of future, his Sovpunk is closer to historical fiction, and its preoccupation with misery resembles that of 1990s chernukha . In Indirectly, Sovpunk is the antithesis of the rosy Soviet nostalgia that has taken hold in the twenty-first century. If it describes a literary trend, it is the liberal intellectual response to two decades of softpeddling Stalinism. HIs Sovpunk would fit Guzel Yakhina's dekulakization novel,Zuleikha (2015) and its 2020 television adaptation, even as the actual Sovpunk on the Internet would be much more acceptable to Zuleikha's many detractors (who condemned the novel and the series as exaggerations of Stalin's crimes).
Salnikov's displacement of Sovpunk to the past highlights what is actually at stake: the extent to which Soviet history says something about Russia today and can serve as a model for Russia tomorrow. Like it or not, the Soviet Union now matters. Though the fantasy writer in Indirectly dwells much more on the negative, he does mention Sovpunk's "light" variety, which means that really any story that seems to go out of its way to immerse the reader in Soviet realia is Sovpunk, regardless of any given ideological spin. This is Salnikov's own "fantasy" of Sovpunk; to borrow a phrase from the Brezhnev era, "actually existing Sovpunk" tends to be both "light" and aggressively pro-Soviet. Salnikov's apparently deliberate misprision of Sovpunk in Indirectly nevertheless does valuable work, however indirectly. Salnikov's version of Sovpunk renders it a form of wish fulfillment or sympathetic magic. The important thing is not the ideological content, but the simple fact of the reconstruction of the Soviet Union in the realm of the imagination. This version of Sovpunk, then, is an aesthetic variation on the work of the Citizens of the USSR from Chapter 3: a recreation of a lost world through the assertion of sheer will.
Notes
[1] Here I am following Lisa Hayden's lead in my translation of this title (http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-big-wheel-effect-salnikovs-chilling.html). Oposredovanno first appeared in the journal Volga in 2018, before being published by the prestigious Redaktsiia Elena Shubinoi as a separate book the following year.