Imaginary Worlds - Beyond the Iron Curtain

Episode Date: March 23, 2017

Comrades! The USSR pioneered the craft of science fiction long before the decadent West. This is not an opinion - this is a scientific fact. Noted intellectuals Anindita Banerjee, Sibelan Forrester, Asif Siddiqi, Gregory Afinogenov and the author's father Steven Molinsky discuss how the glorious Soviet people brought the Revolution to Mars, and used science fiction such as Aelita and Solaris to explore existential questions. Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live forever in outer space!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Now, longtime listeners to this podcast might have noticed that I tend to bring up the Cold War from time to time. I mean, it was the defining global conflict of my childhood. But it's also an interest that I picked up from my father. Are you there?

Can you hear me? I can hear you. I'm like in the studio right now. Do I sound very professional or do I sound like I'm on the phone? No, you're always professional sounding. Okay. Even when you're not being professional, you're professional. That is my dad, Professor Stephen Malinsky of Boston University. In the 1960s, when he was getting his Ph.D. in linguistics,

he focused on Slavic languages and took two trips to the Soviet Union. The night I landed in Moscow was, I still, it's probably one of the most exciting experiences I can remember. Just landing in this mysterious place, and I remember going from the airport into the city, into Moscow, and it was, I couldn't believe that people were living there. I saw lights on in apartments. It was in the evening time. And it was just, it was so exciting for me. I still can remember the feeling of what it was like. This was, you know, behind the iron curtain, and I couldn't believe I was there as a 21-year-old kid. I remember you had all these really funny anecdotes that I used to love hearing as a kid. And one of them was about socialist realism. I think I was probably the only kid who said, Dad, tell me that joke about socialist realism again.

But it's actually it's a really important concept to understand about sort of the standard that all of Soviet culture was supposed to aspire to. Well, it was it was a one eyed, one legged general. This is a story that I was told. A one-eyed, one-legged general commissioned a painting. And so the realist came and painted him with one eye and one leg, and he was shot. And then the romanticist came in and painted him with two eyes and two legs, and he was shot. And then they brought in the socialist realist, and the socialist realist painted him seated sideways on a horse. That's socialist realism. It's such a great, like, I feel like I understand Soviet propaganda

perfectly from that one anecdote. Absolutely. Just put out a very positive, positive look on everything. So what were some of the other sort of surprises for you there, things that you just didn't expect to see? Well, the Russians at the time were extremely friendly towards me. And their propaganda was interesting. They used to talk about the American people versus ruling circles, that the ruling circles were the bad people. And so I, as an ordinary American kid, I was very, very welcomed and people were extremely friendly. Although some people were very nervous about talking to a Westerner on the street. At the time, they had these people, they were guardians of the public morals, where they would walk the streets to make sure that people were not fraternizing with Westerners. So now, I know you're not a big science fiction fan, but I've been looking into the history of Soviet science fiction, and I think you're going to find this really interesting.

Yeah. Now, as much as I'd like to, I can't cover an entire genre throughout a whole empire. So I'm just going to focus on two films that I really liked. Each one was based on a novel, and I think they say a lot about the different eras in which they were created and about the hopes and anxieties of people living behind the Iron Curtain. Now, an obvious place to start would be Russia. But the Cold War was a global conflict. Every country had to choose which side they were on, where the choice would be made for them. India tilted towards the USSR.

And that is where Cornell professor Anandita Banjari grew up. I grew up. expensive to buy than the Soviet books, which were heavily subsidized by the Soviet government. And so I ended up buying a whole lot of books translated from the Russian language, both classics like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also science fiction. And today she's one of the premier scholars of Soviet science fiction outside of Russia. Now, the funny thing is, Soviet science fiction existed before the Soviet Union did. It began with Alexander Bogdanov, who was one of Vladimir Lenin's rivals. In 1908, Bogdanov wrote a novel called Red Star, which imagined communism on Mars.

Red Star was a bestseller. It was a super hit. It sold so well that Lenin actually got very, very annoyed with the phenomenon that it was becoming among the party workers. Workers are not supposed to be carried away by emotional flows of dreaming about the future, that's a very bourgeois thing to do. Gregory Afinaganov is a lecturer at Harvard. He was born in the USSR. He says Lenin may not have liked science fiction, but Lenin was still dabbling in science fiction, even if he didn't realize it. Communism, Marxism sees itself as a scientific theory of history. And, of course, the formula was always that communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country, which at the time for Russia was very much a science fiction project. Anandita Banjari says the new Soviet government

wanted this technological revolution to come from the ground up, not be top-down. So they encouraged everyone in Russia to become amateur scientists. There was a huge, huge enthusiasm. I have written in my book about many magazines, actually, that were run for and by these amateur groups of people who got together, experimented with jet propulsion, stuff like that, way before it became a reality, and were really quite obsessed with conquering outer space. Which laid the groundwork for the first golden age of Soviet science fiction.

It began with the publication of Alita in 1923, the novels about a scientist who hears radio signals from Mars and travels there to meet the Martian queen, Alita. And he discovers that Martian society is on the brink of collapse and ripe for socialism. So the plot is very similar to Red Star, but the writing is much better. The author, Alexei Tolstoy, was practically literary royalty. Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, of course, was from the famous Tolstoy family. He's related to Leo Tolstoy and also to a 19th century poet who came before all of them

and was the first famous literary Tolstoy in the Russian world. That is Siblin Forrester. She teaches Soviet science fiction at Swarthmore College. He had been educated as an engineer, although he was largely self-educated. He'd grown up in the provinces reading people's books in their libraries. And so one of the things he claimed was that as an engineer, I can guarantee that all of the science and all of the engineering in this book is absolutely correct. It went through several different editions,

and every time Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, the good little Soviet collaborator that he was, would rewrite it and take out more and more of the things that were inappropriate. So in the first edition, there's a character who has been in the Red Army, and he's now bored because the revolution is over and it's all been successful. And he goes to the moon with an inventor, and this guy is looting corpses that they happen to go by. He's taking the gold and the gems off their bodies. And in the later versions, that's not, of course, included. He becomes a much more straight-up revolutionary figure. In 1924, Alito was turned into a film. The director, Yakov Protajanov, made even more changes.

Like the trip to Mars turned out to be just a dream. This was also one of the first mega-blockbusters in the Soviet Union. Asif Siddiqui is a professor at Fordham University. You know, there was massive publicity preceding the opening of the first mega blockbusters in the Soviet Union. Asif Siddiqui is a professor at Fordham University. You know, there was a massive publicity preceding the opening of the movie. They produced lots of flyers, many of which were dropped from airplanes. Even on the opening of the movie, the day it opened, you know, there was huge crowds outside the movie theater. And it is said that the director himself couldn't get into the movie theater

because the crowds were so big. Protazanov's Aelita starts with something that's in the novel, but I think it's dramatized just amazingly on the screen, this receiving of radio signals, right? In some ways, you could argue that it's that radio signal that the hero falls in love with long before he actually comes face to face with the Martian princess. The movie was silent with the piano score, but it's visually stunning. I mean, think of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Except this came out three years before Metropolis, and it was done on a Soviet budget.

It intercuts images of Moscow and other parts of Russia in the early 1920s. So right after the revolution, you're really seeing something that looks a lot like traditional Russia with a few changes. And then on the other hand, this amazing Martian scene with amazing constructivist sets built by Aleksandr Ekster or designed rather by Aleksandr Ekster and Isak Rabinovich, two constructivist artists. And Ekster also designed the costumes. So if you see this movie, it's just amazing.

The soldiers look kind of like Lego minifigs. The ruling class wears these wonderful, I don't even know how to describe them, sort of Roman-ish outfits. Aelita herself wears a strapless ball gown and a headdress that I can only describe as a craft project made out of pipe cleaners. Now, in the 1920s, the Soviet Union was reeling from civil war and economic hardship, so Alija was perfect kind of escapist entertainment. And that made the leaders of the revolution nervous. They wondered if science fiction was another opium for the masses.

In the main character, the scientist, he is not a flattering portrait of the intellectuals that led the revolution. Audiences were way more into his sidekick, a Red Army veteran named Gustav. The swashbuckling Red Army guys, he has the time of his life and he gives speeches and he frees the Martian slaves from their dungeons and they come up and they sing a rousing song together and so forth. And then he swashbuckles back to Earth and is not really devastated. And then there is this poor, you know, intellectual scientist, engineer, hero

who loses everything in that same journey and at the end is really kind of lost. And meanwhile, there's this new generation of avant-garde filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein, who are really revolutionary in the way they approach film. And they're the kind of filmmakers that the Soviet government want to promote. And from the perspective of film historians, they kind of take over the scene, even though their films didn't make much money.

You know who else didn't like science fiction? Stalin. Once Stalin consolidates his power in the 1930s, a lot of films from the 1920s get sucked into this black hole of censorship. So I don't think Aelita was exceptional in that sense. But Aelita, the movie, sense but Aelita the movie also expresses a very ambivalent image of the revolution the revolution is supposed to be for the proletariat and for the working class and rah rah rah but the movie Aelita is very ambiguous because it's it's shown ultimately to be a dream in the imagination of the protagonist and it provokes

thinking more than offers any clear-cut answers and perhaps that may have played a part in ultimately eliminating that movie from public showings. And from there, socialist realism becomes the officially sanctioned art form of the Soviet Union. Science fiction went underground. I mean, it popped up in children's literature, a few random films, but that's about it. You still with me, Dad? Oh, yeah, I'm with you. It's interesting. I can see why someone like Stalin would not approve of the science fiction.

He was not grounded in the reality of the workers and so forth. Well, you know, science fiction actually does make a huge comeback. It changes the world in a way that Lenin could only dream of. Really? Yes, but that's coming just ahead after my capitalist break. Before we get back to the show, I want to tell you about a great podcast you should check out, Gastropod. It's a show about food, but it's really about the history and science and stories that led to the moment when you put that delicious food or drink into your mouth. Listening to the hosts Cynthia Graber and Nikki Twilley,

you'll learn all sorts of interesting tidbits about oysters or chocolate, cocktails or kombucha, which will make you the hit of any dinner party. You'll even be able to vouch as to whether there's any truth behind the reputations of some foods being aphrodisiacs. You can subscribe to Gastropod in iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stalin dies in 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, loosened things up a bit,

and Soviet culture began to thaw. A few adult science fiction novels make their way through the censors, but it was two brothers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who made the genre popular again. So their most famous novel is called Monday Starts on Saturday about a scientific research institute filled with various fairy tale animals and stuff. When Gregory Afinaganov was a kid, he used to love reading the Strugatsky brothers. about a scientific research institute filled with various fairy tale animals and stuff. When Gregory Afinaganov was a kid, he used to love reading the Strogatzky brothers.

And the sequel to that is about a group of people from this institute who go out and confront this evil monster who is actually a bureaucratic committee. But it's very clearly a satire of bureaucracy, and they don't pull any punches, really. They could satirize the system through science fiction because the censors did not exactly have rich imaginations. In fact, they didn't even have to write about socialist utopias anymore. Oh, they could get dystopian as long as they were writing about the West. Or another galaxy, says Siblin Forrester. Then they became much more concerned about issues of human freedom, issues of morality. Their first really great work is called Hard to Be a God. And in it, they write about a planet that's kind of in a late medieval state. There's an inquisition. There's a very corrupt government.

And several observers from Earth Earth from a particular scientific research institute who have to stand back and not intervene. So there's this idea of not intervening in the fate of the planet. And one of them becomes so incensed by having to do this, that when the young woman he loves is killed by a mob, he goes out with his superior strength and fighting skills and just wipes out a whole bunch of them and then is taken into custody and really leaves the question of what do you do in a situation that to the reader today of that novel looks very much like the beginnings of a fascist system. Although Gregory wants to make this disclaimer. There is a tendency sometimes to read all Soviet literature as being, you know, a hidden critique.

And I think that's dangerous in the sense that a lot of people, and especially a lot of Soviet science fiction writers, very much identified with the values of the culture and the regime. In fact, Gregory's grandfather, who was a huge science fiction fan, worked on the Soviet space program. And many of the science fiction writers in the Soviet Union were working scientists. Asif Siddiqui has writers in the Soviet Union were working scientists. Asif Siddiqui has written about the Soviet space program. And he says, remember, this is the generation that grew up in the 1920s when Alita was all the rage. It deeply, deeply, I think, affects the way they imagine the future of space travel as a kind of straight, state-run program.

They set the goals that they had imagined in their youth. Other people who've looked at the proliferation of science fiction in the United States, particularly in the 1920s, you have this kind of amazing stories, Buck Rogers, kind of almost pulpish kind of fiction, science fiction. So it was already at that time a not-unrespected feel of literature. It was just cast aside. This is not real literature, so it's for kids. So in that sense, I think there was always a sense among rocket designers and engineers in the U.S.

that they were sort of laboring in this field that didn't have much respect, at least from intellectuals. In the Soviet Union, it was very different. Science fiction was considered a very sort of legitimate form of artistic kind of expression. I think that maybe enculturates a kind of more serious attitude towards space. That's ironic because Sputnik was the thing, that was actually the thing that made most people in the U.S. suddenly take it all very seriously. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, Sputnik was a shock. It was a shock not only that the Soviet Union did it, but it was a shock because it brought space firmly and squarely into the popular imagination of the U.S. And wasn't there a Soviet satellite named Aelita?

Well, actually, the truth is that there was a program in 1969, a project proposed to the Soviet government to send cosmonauts to Mars. And that project was named Aelita. The man who was in charge of that project, Vladimir Chalome, clearly had seen the movie as a kid. This stuck with him. So when he finally proposed this enormous project to the Politburo, he called it Aelita, which is, I think, a telling little piece of information that these people kept these influences through an entire life. But the work of science fiction that fascinates me most from this era is Solaris.

Solaris began as a novel in 1961. The writer Stanislaw Lem was Polish, but the novel was widely circulated throughout the Soviet empire. In the story, Solaris is the name of a planet which is covered by a mysterious ocean. A crew of cosmonauts bombards the ocean with X-rays to figure out what it's made of. But the ocean is a sentient being. It responds by hitting the cosmonauts with its own energy field so it can figure out what makes these human beings tick.

And soon the cosmonauts discover these alien beings on their ship that are exact replicas of their lost loved ones. The main character is a psychologist named Chris Kelvin who spends most of the book conversing with his wife even though she committed suicide years earlier. He knows that she's not really his wife. In fact, he knows that she's not human before even she realizes it. But that doesn't stop him from being tortured by his guilt and his love for her. In 1972, the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made an adaptation

that became the most internationally acclaimed Soviet science fiction film in the West. In fact, it was called the Soviet answer to the film 2001. Now, I loved Solaris. It's slow and long, but really intense and haunting, and the performances are great. And it's funny because there's a Hollywood remake that totally bombed. And it just can't be made into an American film because the hero is not a problem solver. He is grappling with something that is much bigger than himself and humanity,

and he's just overwhelmed. When I was watching Solaris, I kept thinking about Alita. Anandita Banjari says, I'm not totally wrong. The films actually have a lot in common. They each play with the contrast between gritty life in the Soviet Union and the ethereal possibilities of space. The spaceship in Solaris astounds me because on the one hand, it is very futuristic,

but periodically it just slips in and out where it looks like, you know, your kind of cruddy Soviet apartment. Which makes sense because Soviet ideology was all about tolerating discomfort in the present because a glorious socialist utopia awaited everybody in the future. Both stories are about intellectuals that fall in love with alien women who are not what they seem. And the international acclaim that Alita and Solaris both earned was a source of pride and angst for the Soviet government. In the 1970s, the Soviets were very competitive

and wanting to compete on every front, from rocketry to chess to hockey to ballet. But a new interest in promoting Soviet science fiction meant more scrutiny of the content itself. The director of Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, became so frustrated he eventually defected to France and died soon after. Documents emerged later, suggesting that he may have been poisoned by the KGB. Siblin Forrester says even the beloved Strugatsky brothers were being micromanaged during this time. And there's a strong suggestion in Boris Strugatsky's memoirs that they were called in for unpleasant conversations with the KGB, after which they modified their writing

somewhat, changed their themes somewhat, and many people argue that, in fact, their writing wasn't as good after that. As Strugatsky brothers are still read today, particularly among Russian intellectuals who feel stifled in Putin's Russia, but Gregory Afinaginov says Soviet-style science fiction, with its existential angst, is just not in vogue anymore. These days, fantasy and mysticism are much more popular. Or time travel, back to the glory days of World War II, or as it's known over there, the Great Patriotic War. You know, the horizons of kind of like political utopianism or anticipation of the future in Russia right now are very narrow. We're not even talking about it's hard to imagine the end of capitalism.

I mean, it's hard to imagine the end of Putinism. So why should we care about science fiction from an empire that doesn't exist anymore, whose ideology has been discredited? Well, first of all, Siblin Forrester says, it's great stuff. If you wanted to say anything interesting, you had to kind of hide it under the surface. And therefore, by definition, the work rewards repeated reading. And to say that a work rewards repeated reading is to say that it's a good piece of literature. So a lot of the science fiction is really very high quality.

Asif Siddiqui agrees. Dissent in a kind of repressive society isn't just going out in the streets and throwing a rock. You can do all sorts of other things, and you can reach your audience in a lot of different ways. I think especially now, if one is unhappy with what's going on, I think this is a good time to start thinking about these kinds of works. And Soviet science fiction can be really refreshing and give you a new perspective on the future if you're only used to Western sci-fi. American science fiction is all about externalization, the outward manifestation of conflict. And indeed, debauchery. Russian and then Soviet science fiction, they are turned inwards. They are always journeys through the psyche.

Gregory Afinaginoff. You know, a lot of the conflicts in traditional Western sci-fi really boil down to things that are structurally sort of assumed in capitalism. Like imagine a future society in which that profit and private corporate gain isn't overriding organizing principle. Then maybe it is possible to think about a utopia that's not just like, you know, a blank white color that's completely lacks any kind of conflict or relief. All right. So, Dad. Yeah. What did you think? Did learning about Soviet science fiction give you a new perspective? What fascinated me the most was the fact that it's considered good literature. And it's an outlet for people to really talk about some serious type issues.

Was there other kind of Soviet stuff that you know about or other ways in which people could sort of express their views through coded metaphor? Well, a lot of humor and cartoon, political type cartoons, I think, were circulated around. But you had to be careful about who you were humorous with. That's the situation. All right. Well, thank you so much. Spasibo, right? Spasibo.

Pожалуйста, as they say. You're welcome. All right. Well, that is it much. Спасибо, right? Спасибо. Пожалуйста, as they say. You're welcome. All right. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Это все. Сегодня спасибо большое за внимание. What is the literal translation of that? I think I said thank you very much for your attention. Okay. You didn't just accidentally order a ham sandwich. No, I did not accidentally order a bowl of borscht.

Special thanks to Anandita Banjari, Siblin Forrester, Asif Siddiqui, and Gregory Afinaghenov. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski and the show's website is Panoply.