Russia had its own prodigious range of science fiction which, unlike that of the West, formed part of its mainstream literature from the very start. Science fiction served as an arena for Utopian blueprints of the future society, such as the 'Fourth Dream' in Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1862), from which Lenin drew his communist ideals. It was a testing ground for the big moral ideas of Russian literature - as in Dostoevsky's science-fiction tale, 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' (1877), in which the vision of salvation through scientific and material progress advanced by Chernyshevsky is dispelled in a dream of Utopia on a perfect twin of earth: the cosmic paradise soons breaks down into a society of masters and slaves, and the narrator wakes up from his dream to see that the only true salvation is through Christian love of one's fellow human beings.
Mixing science fiction with mystical belief was typical of the Russian literary tradition, where the path to the ideal was so often seen in terms of the transcendence of this world and its mundane realities. The Russian Revolution was accompanied by a huge upsurge of apocalyptic science fiction. Bogdanov, the Bolshevik co-founder of Proletkult, took the lead with his science-fiction novels, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913), which portrayed the communist Utopia on the planet Mars sometime in the middle of the third millennium. This cosmic vision of socialist redemption fuelled the boom of science fiction writing in the 1920s, from Platonov's Utopian tales to Aleksei Tolstoy's bestselling novels Aelita (1922) and The Garin Death Ray (1926), which returned to the Martian theme of science in the service of
the proletariat. Like its nineteenth-century antecedents, this fantastic literature was a vehicle for the great philosophical and moral questions about science and conscience. Zamyatin's science fiction drew from the Russian tradition to develop a humanist critique of the Soviet technological Utopia. His dystopian novel We derived much of its moral argument from Dostoevsky. The central conflict of the novel, between the rational, all-providing high-tech state and the beautiful seductress I-3 30, whose deviant and irrational need for freedom threatens to subvert the power of that absolutist state, is a continuation of the discourse which stands at the centre of 'The Grand Inquisitor' in The Brothers Karamazov about the unending conflict between the human needs for security and liberty.*
Science fiction largely disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s. Socialist Realism left no space for Utopian dreams, or any form of moral ambiguity, and the only science fiction that was not stamped out was that which extolled Soviet technology. But the space programme of the 1950s led to a resurgence of science fiction in the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev, who was a devotee of the genre, encouraged writers to return to the traditions of the pre-Stalin years.
Ivan Efremov's Andromeda (1957) was perhaps the most important work in this new wave, and certainly one of the bestselling (with over 20 million copies sold in the Soviet Union alone). Set in a distant future, when the earth has been united with the other galaxies in a universal civilization, it portrays a cosmic paradise in which science plays a discreet role in providing for all human needs; but what emerges above all else as the purpose of existence is the eternal need of human beings for ethical relationships, freedom, beauty and creativity. Efre-mov was bitterly attacked by communist hardliners: his emphasis on spiritual values was uncomfortably close to a fundamental challenge
* It may be that the title of Zamyatin's novel We was drawn at least in part from Dostoevsky - in particular from Verkhovensky's words to Stavrogin (in The Devils, trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 42.3) where he describes his vision of the future revolutionary dictatorship ('[W]e shall consider how to erect an edifice of stone… We shall build it, we, we alone!'). Perhaps more obviously, the title may have been a reference to the revolutionary cult of the collective (the Proletkult poet Kirillov even wrote a poem by the title of 'We'). See further G. Kern, Zamyatin's We: A Collection of Critical Essays (Ann Arbor, 1988), p. 63.
