About the Soviet superfactory Russian Dream

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Only in the USSR did a whole super-factory of the Russian Dream emerge. Great fantastic literature, intertwining with popular science magazines, books and films, immersed the citizen of the Soviet Union in the amazing worlds of the future, where he wanted to live and work.

To the worlds of the realized Russian dream, where the greatest victories in science and technology were combined with the triumph of Truth, that very social justice. All this was not an "escape from reality": culture was becoming a powerful accelerator of quite material, material development of a huge country, a country-planet. Indeed, the production of the Russian Dream in the USSR has become a kind of Stream. And this experience remains to be studied.

Reach for the stars

The founders of the Land of Soviets perfectly understood the role of images of the future and fantasy for pushing the country forward. Ulyanov-Lenin himself was once deeply impressed by Albert Robid's novel "The Twentieth Century. Electric Life" (1890). The Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov (Malinovsky) wrote The Red Planet (about the journey to Mars) in 1908. So the initial impetus for the flourishing of the science fanatic genre in the Soviet Union was very strong.

What the ossified Marxist-Leninist philosophy could not answer, the people of the Soviet Union of our generations found in the great works of science fiction of the USSR. If we call the Dream superfactory, which powerfully rose up in the Red Empire, a kind of Techno-Church, then its "fathers" and spiritual leaders can be considered Alexei Tolstoy, Ivan Efremov and Alexander Belyaev, the early Strugatsky. You can safely put Vladimir Savchenko next to them. Perhaps, a little lower in the iconostasis of the Techno-Church are occupied by the faces of Askold Yakubovsky, Sever Gansovsky, Georgy Gurevich, Alexander Kazantsev, Kir Bulychev, Genrikh Altov, Igor Rosokhovatsky, Georgy Martynov, Grigory Adamov - and so on, up to individual stories and stories and so on.

We are not writing literary research. We remember those alluring, breathtaking worlds, which almost every Soviet boy got into. Sometimes he did not even remember the authors of these, read excitedly works. But in "The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin", having touched the magnificent prose of the Silver Age, he saw a world where injustice fell, where the cleansing fire of the Red Revolution led to the triumph of workers over parasites. In the novels of Alexander Belyaev, he visited not just an orbital station, but a real cosmic "etheric" settlement - the star "KEC". That is, in the orbital city named after the great Tsiolkovsky. And here the reader, together with the heroes of the novel, explored the secrets of the Moon …

Belyaev prepared our souls for great breakthroughs: mastering nuclear energy, organ transplants, television. He showed the possibilities of controlling the behavior of huge masses of people with the help of what would now be called psychotronic generators. He was the first to show the possibility of transplanting a brain into another body, investigating the sharpest collisions of human consciousness in this case. And the Ichthyander, created by Belyaev's imagination, is a man who can breathe under water, and to this day excites the imagination …

But that was only the very first layer of unbearably attractive worlds, where a young citizen of the USSR fell, who later became a scientist-researcher, designer, engineer, and highly qualified worker. Russian-Soviet science fiction created a kind of integral world of the USSR, the world winner. In it, you dived in a deep-sea Russian bathyscaphe and hunted a giant architheutis squid, guarding whale herds. In it, you explored the swamps of Venus (until 1965 it was believed that this is a planet of dense jungle and eternal rains) and found in them the fallen spaceship of a mysterious extraterrestrial civilization. Thanks to all these authors, we landed on an anamesonic starship on the planet of eternal night, under the rays of an infrared star. Or they penetrated the space on the ZPL - a direct beam starship. We crossed the seas on the Pioneer super submarine. Traveled into the bowels of the planet on a subway. They transmitted energy through the ionosphere, simultaneously shaming enemies, envious people and traitors. We rode in an all-terrain vehicle through the Martian dust storms and discovered the underground cities of long-dead Martians, met the mysterious Faetians from the planet that died between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. They rushed in high-speed trains along the overpasses - and walked along the streets of unprecedented garden-cities of the future. Our cities! They hovered over them on airborne flyers. We entered into contact with another mind. Death was conquered. Captured by soulless aliens, they rebelled on a prison starship, allied with other sentient beings. They destroyed cruel feudal lords on a distant planet, being progressors. Or they defeated no less cruel mutant octopuses, who became intelligent and received the gift of telepathy, the ability to break the will of people …

This cumulative world of the Russian Dream and the Russian Victory literally sucked into itself. Many of us have paid tribute to science fiction in one way or another. The program for the development of the victorious Russian-Soviet civilization is outlined in the already forgotten book by Valentin Ivanov (Russian nationalist and author of the cult "Primordial Rus") - in the novel "Energy Is Subservient to Us!" (1952). First - to master the inexhaustible oceans of intra-atomic energy. Then - to consider the aging of the human body as a disease that can be cured. And - to conquer death! Having spawned, in fact, a race of Russian supermen, capable of flying between the stars. What is this if not a continuation of the traditions of Russian cosmism by Tsiolkovsky and Fedorov? To gain immortality - and reach the stars, spread throughout the Universe. Already turned into something more than the current "homo sapiens".

Such a race can easily repel the asteroid threat to Earth. She will be able to control the climate and even in the Arctic will build cities under transparent domes. It will send the energy of oil, gas and coal into oblivion. Everything else is mere trifles to her. Block the Tatar Strait between Sakhalin and the mainland with a dam, leading to a warming of the Primorye climate? A purely engineering problem that both cheap nuclear energy and huge machines will allow to solve. To irrigate the Karakum and Kyzylkums? You are welcome! And tomorrow we will master the secret of gravity and will be able to soar in the sky. But along the way - to turn entire areas of the Earth into reserves, where revived mammoths, megateria and other fauna of the Early Cenozoic will roam.

It was this gigantic, networked, distributed Dream Superfactory that forged and shaped our consciousness in the great Soviet Union. Including - and the consciousness of the author of these lines. On the reserve of her energy, we are still fighting the forces of Darkness and dehumanization, without losing our fiery faith in the future of our people.

In contrast to the semi-official Marxist-Leninist philosophy that had died by that time, science fiction in those years painted the world of our future (possible!) Triumph. She staged bold social experiences, albeit imaginary ones. What is only the social structure that Ivan Efremov portrayed in his great "The Nebula of Andromeda" and "Hour of the Bull"! Or in the children's books like "Dunno in the Solar City" and "Dunno on the Moon" by Nikolai Nosov.

But fantasy was only the first contour that gave rise to the great Stream of the Russian Dream.

Stalin's military fiction

One cannot but mention the military fiction of the Stalin era - a genre that has completely disappeared from our literature after 1945. But in the 1930s, it also ignited the imagination of our people and prompted bold breakthroughs in science and technology.

Such was, for example, the book by Vladimir Vladko in 1934 "Air torpedoes are turning back", which told about the West's attempt to destroy the USSR with the help of unmanned aircraft with warheads, a kind of forerunner of cruise missiles - "tomahawks". Surprisingly, the professor's assistant, General Renoir, the creator of air torpedoes, is called Sergei Gagarin. The evil irony of history? However, in Vladko's novel, the attack is planned for 4 o'clock in the morning, in June. The shadow of the future captured by the author?

And now, under the cover of air armada, a wave of aero torpedoes goes to Moscow. General Renoir oversees the operation from a flying command post, an enormous gyroplane.

But the Soviet Union directs beams of strange searchlights to the attacking air armadas of the enemy …

Applying the most innovative types of technology and the decomposition of the enemy's rear, the USSR in the book by Vladimir Vladko utterly smashes the West and Japan, causing a world revolution.

The rider on the starry horse …

So, book fiction was just the first outline of the Superfactory of the Russian Dream. The second contour was cinematic science fiction. It is generally believed that the first breakthrough was the 1924 adaptation of Aelita by Protazanov. But this is not so: the film turned out to be philistine-belittled, which is why the author of "Aelita" himself openly hated it.

No, the first epoch-making leap was made by the great director Vasily Zhuravlev (1904-1987). When young Maxim Kalashnikov watched with enthusiasm one of the first holographic stereofilms of the USSR (in today's newspeak - 3D cinema), Rider on a Golden Horse in 1980, he did not know then that the film was directed by the legendary Zhuravlev. The one that created a real breakthrough into a new reality at that time - the 1936 Space Voyage tape. Yes, yes, the one that Tsiolkovsky himself consulted and drew the drawings of the spacecraft. In that film, the USSR in 1946 sends an expedition to the moon. Moreover, the rocket takes off along an overpass against the background of Moscow of the future, the panorama of which was created by the best architects of the country. Weightlessness in the picture was filmed so reliably that real cosmonauts of the 1970s marveled at its transmission …

Yes, that was a breakthrough - with a tremendous impact on the minds and hearts of millions of people. The cosmos was portrayed as something already close, attainable. In ten years! Alas, the hellish trials of the Great Patriotic War lay between the cinema of 1936 and the Gagarin start of 1961 …

In 1935, "The Death of a Sensation" based on the novel "Robotari Go" by Vladimir Vladko was released. Director Alexander Andrievsky (1899-1983) makes a film about how the idealist Jim Ripl creates robots in order to save people from hard work. But the capitalists replace living workers with them, throwing them out of the gates of factories and factories. And when the workers go on strike and riot, the rulers turn the robots into columns of ruthless assassins and punishers. Ripl himself dies in an attempt to stop them. But the rebel workers take over control of the robots. This means that they take power - and the robots will continue to serve people …

Then Andrievsky will become one of the founders of the Soviet stereoscopic cinema. And Vladko in 1939 will create an amazing story "Descendants of the Scythians" - about how Soviet people end up in a huge underground world, where the Scythian tribe and the descendants of their Hellenic captives still live …

The transfer of literary fiction to the movie screen suggested itself. Moreover, the Soviet cinema was not afraid of the most daring experiments. Everyone admires Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, but for me a much bigger breakthrough is the 1934 film New Gulliver, directed by Vladimir Ptushko. The first cinema in the world where a live actor was combined with puppet cartoon characters (a similar technique was used by Karel Zeman in Czechoslovakia only in 1955!). God himself ordered the USSR to shoot the brightest fantastic films. Epics, space operas, blockbusters! But then there was a difficult war and years of the country's rise from ruins.

Therefore, alas, the next breakthrough in science fiction cinema occurred only in 1961, with the release of "Planet of Storms" by Pavel Klushantsev (1910-1999) - an adventure film about the Russian landing on Venus, which shook the imagination of the whole world and prompted George Lucas to the creation of Star Wars. It was a stunning combination of inventive special effects, shooting techniques and great actors. Alas, in the USSR this film has practically not been shown since the early 1970s. The innovator Klushantsev went mostly to popular science films and books about space for children and youth. But this film was successfully held in twenty-eight countries of the world, it was openly stolen, re-sounding and including its fragments in their crafts. But Klushantsev was not appreciated in his homeland.

The field ceded to the West …

And here we can talk about the colossal failure of the rulers of the USSR. They could not put such a powerful cultural instrument as science fiction cinema into the service of the Russian Dream. Strikingly, in parallel with the real explosion of literary fiction among the Russians, the same was observed among the Americans. But at the same time, the Yankees all flowed into a bright fantastic movie. Let those tapes seem naive today, but their quality has grown from year to year. But in the USSR they could not show the world of their triumphant dream. With its futuropolis cities among taiga and forests, with amazing flying machines, with wonderful new people in a society never seen before. Books in Red Russia were ahead of cinematography, and science fiction came to be regarded as a "low style."

The roaring 1960s, marked by the epoch-making achievements of the USSR in space, damn it, in science fiction cinema turned out to be practically lost for us. And the Yankees are stepping on the gas - they have been running the Star Trek series on television since 1966. We have nothing of the kind. In 1967, an extremely unsuccessful, low-budget film adaptation of The Andromeda Nebula was released. In 1963, the inhabitants of Odessa released "A Dream Towards" - a tape about the contact of the USSR with another civilization. But these films do not give an idea of the future of our state. So, a little futuristic set and that's it. The situation is clearly akin to the state of science fiction in the current Russian Federation …

However, even in this form, the science fiction of the USSR kindled the minds and hearts of young people. The next phenomenon - the films "Moscow-Cassiopeia" and "Youths in the Universe", filmed in 1973 and 1974, had to wait too long. And they were still childish. Their director, Richard Viktorov (1929-1983), was able to make another breakthrough, match the achievements of Zhuravlev and Klushantsev only in 1980, in the film "Through Thorns - to the Stars". It was there that life in the USSR of the XXI century was shown. This great film is still watched. But it was no longer enough to withstand the triumphant march of American science fiction, starting with Star Wars, which started in 1977. Tarkovsky's Solaris, released in 1972, is not about Russians, its action takes place far, far from Earth. And the rest of the USSR's attempts to film science fiction are not very impressive. The failed "Aquanauts" in 1979. Wonderful but children's cartoon "The Mystery of the Third Planet" by Ruvim Kachanov. Even Pavel Arsenov's "Guest from the Future" (1984), although it showed Moscow in 2084 and still evokes an aching feeling of nostalgia in my generation, did not close the gaping failure. The image of the embodied Russian Dream in its Soviet, red version seemed to disappear into the fog of time.

By that time, the very top of the USSR did not have such an image in their own heads. The "collective mind" of the late Communist Party of the Soviet Union has faded. And there they were already thinking about something completely different. You can scoff at them for this as much as you want, but don't we see practically the same picture in today's RF? Can you name at least one cinematic work about the great future of our country after the 1991 catastrophe? In this respect, the Russian Federation is depressingly sterile, its population perceives the images that are created in Hollywood, at the "dream factory" of a civilization hostile to us.

The fact remains: it was Russian-Soviet science fiction that immersed us in the world of the country's victorious future in the 1970s and early 1980s. She carried the torch of the Russian Dream. None of the five-year plans and reports of the general secretaries of the CPSU at the next "historical" congresses of the ruling party fulfilled this mission. And the USSR sorely lacked the strongest elixir of the Russian Dream in the form of bright films. And as soon as Western science fiction burst into the country's film market, it conquered the minds of the masses in the blink of an eye. I imposed my vision of the Future on them.

But this does not mean at all that the Soviet treasury is devalued. After all, the literary contour of the Superfactory of the Russian Dream was then strengthened by other contours. Other parts of the red Technochurch. It is this experience that has been consigned to oblivion in the Russian Federation (Belovezhskaya Russia). And the criminal oblivion …

This huge cultural heritage of the Russians still lies under the wraps, they stubbornly ignore it and try to send it into oblivion. For it is disgusting to the base nature of raw corpse eaters and embezzlers. But the unsealing of this treasury and its creative development will be a huge breakthrough in the Russian consciousness, the acquisition by the Russian Dream of its figurative flesh. These are the same Scrolls of Ivan the Fool. Gift of the Wind and the Russian superman - against the undead and archaic "Game of Thrones".