The following article appeared in the January, 1989 issue of Locus Magazine. It is presented for historical interest. The fall of the Communist Party from power ended the ideological state, and the state's monopoly on publishing. There have been a series of SF magazines since 1989, most of which perished in the hyperinflation of the 90s. The principal survivor is Esli, or 'IF.'

Soviet SF in the Era of Glasnost

An Adaptation of 'Everything Still Ahead" by Kir Bulychev [from Ural Stalker No 4,1988] translated by John H Costello

If some dozens of issues dealt with may be summarized, they boil down to: that our SF is published fantastically scantily; that we do not even have our own publishing organ, an "SF' magazine; that the situation of SF fan clubs is unstable and at times ephemeral.

And the people who are supposed to listen, do not.

We can all stigmatize the surrounding reality. But while public opinion in our country is still in the process of being created and is heavily dependent on support from above for its very existence, it cannot have the power to surmount the hurdles which stand in the path of the development of our favorite form of art.

I should here make a reservation: the widespread term "SF genre." It is a species of art including in itself the most diverse genres, from tragedy to burlesque and detective fiction. It is an original and distinctive view of the world, of reality. And it is precisely this fact which plays a sad role in the history of our nation's SF.

Our SF began on a very high level. In the 1920s we were publishing hundreds of books (including translations), and several magazines and annuals which devoted the lion's share of their pages to SF.

The arithmetic is simple. If, today, in the US some thousands of new SF books are published annually, that is more than just a number, that is the soil where new talents will grow. And if from these thousand books 900 are junk, then 100 are still professional, and ten are really good. It is in this soil that public opinion and the qualifications of the critics will rise.

Let's take contemporary Poland for an example. When I was at a Polish SF fan congress last surnmer where about 1,000 delegates from some dozens of clubs had gathered, and which a large student club in the center of the capitol was hosting, I asked them to show me the club's publications. They dragged me to a pile about a meter high. Each club publishes its own magazine or newspaper, many clubs publish their own books. And this creates an atmosphere of glasnost, and an objective (in sum) evaluation of the phenomena of SF literature. And, finally, this offers a platform to young talents. In Poland, the situation where a publishing house may monopolistically publish books of a closed circle of'their people,'counting on the word "SF 'on the cover to automatically take the book into the circles of black market deficits, is unthinkable, but the lack of of any realistic criticism allows this situation to continue year after year in our country.

Thus, in the 1920s, a Ict of books came out. I am certain that the constellation of famous SF writers then was able to flower not only because the conditions in the country promoted their creative genius, but also because of the infrastructure -- hundreds of books by different authors. Aleksander Grin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksei Tolstoy, Andrei Platonov, Evgenij Zamyatin, Via Ehrenburg, Leonid Leonov, Aleksander Belyaev, worked in the midst of their colleagues, the names of whom (and among them were talented people) are forgotten.

Science fiction is topical. This can be repeated without end, but the words seem never to be understood.

SF, I am convinced, is more precise than mainstream literature; it describes the condition of society. I will explain this by the fact that realistic literature predominantly is concerned with the study of man-man relationships; for SF this is more likely: man - society - time.

Contemporary social SF was born in the 20th Century, when human civilization had entered into a period of crises unbelievable from the point of view of the preceding century. The tragic disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire produced the geniuses Kafka and Capek. The revolution in the neighboring imperium gave birth to Soviet SF.

Man by thought seeks the solutions not only to personal, but tosocial problems. We want to understand what exactly causes this and where does that lead. Science fiction always deals with alternatives and implies freedom of thought. The years of the twenties were a time of debates and search.

From the beginning of the thirties, the principle of a single thought, a single will, a single path was exhalted. The words "discussion" and "opposition" became abusive. And were used only at the moment of the liquidation of dissidents. The time that set in was bitter for literature in general, and catastrophic for SF.

Magazines and annual collections closed down, books disappeared. Bulgakov and Platonov worked without planning to seek publication. Grin died. Aleksei Tolstoy, Ehrenburg, and Leonov turned from SF. Some writers vanished without a trace.

The tragedy of the 1930s may be most convincingly traced in the example of Aleksander Belyaev. As far as I can judge, he had no pretenses to artistry; he always remained within the bounds of the game of mass-market SF. And within those limits he had an unbelievably enormous output for the first five-to-seven years of work.

But open up a book by Belyaev written in the thirties and you will find it true to its period. He honestly tried to deal with the issues raised by the historical moment. He wanted to comment on them. He tried to describe pictures of the glowing future, the single version offered: the future heralded by the thunder of kettledrums, massive processions with portraits of the Leader, endlessness of abundant tilled fields, luxuriant clouds from the industrial giants and, chiefly, the unending rapture of all.

Aleksander Belyaev was finished as a writer. His last works were suffused with official optimism.

But literature did not even notice the disappearance of an artist. Like so many others. SF itself had ceased to exist: only the Leader could dream, and the rest sung his praises. Utopias were expected from the SF writers, and they could not create them.

SF literature has had little success with utopias. A utopia may rise to philosophical and even artistic heights only when it is in fact an antiutopia. Ibis is because SF always was and always will be a literature of warning, not homiletics.

The most famous utopias of the last few centuries, when the creation of such was in fact considered the principal function of SF, were born in opposition to the ideals of the existing society. The Utopians tried to find alternatives; if the society was capitalist and Christian, then William Morris described a socialist, pagan world in News From Nowhere, trying to find his own ideals in the denial of the ideals of his rulers. In Russia the clear example of this is Chernishevsky, with his attempt to create a utopia in the novel What is to be Done? His utopia treated nothing with favor -- it just denied everything for which the Russian state stood.

No real utopia has ever existed in SF. A real utopia should be written by a man who believes in the bright future of his own society, sharing his official conception and "pressing in artistic form that ideal of joy, which would be reached precisely on the path of development of a given social structure through his characters.

And this gives rise to a natural question: we live in a socialist state, we share its ideological orientation, we strive by our efforts to hasten the victory of the goals proclaimed by the founders of the socialist teachings. Why then do SF writers in our country and other socialist states not write real utopias?

In the twenties, Soviet SF was born in a period of social upheaval, desperate struggle and cardinal social change, and expressed precisely these changes. Hearts were still inflamed by the ideas of world revolution. Take, for example, Aleksei Tolstoy's Aelita. SF had survived years of ruin, plunged into the doubts of the time of NEP, and gave birth to Heart of a Dog and Blue Cities. It was threatened by the authoritarian trends in the world around it and gave birth to Zamyatin's We. SF is topical. It is contemporary. It cannot give birth to a utopia if the utopia is a set of abstractions.

Come the thirties. Scarcely erected, still surrounded by scaffolding, the edifice of our SF promptly put its head in the sand and covered what stuck above with rosy makeup: postcards of the joyful future from the pens of some now forgotten, talentless and dead writers, sterile fabrications not having in a balanced view any connection with reality. And SF does not forgive such a separation.

Before the Second World War there was a certain rise in enthusiasm for SF, the result of a general presentiment of the world conflict. This is dealt with in Floating Islands by Aleksander Kazantsev, G. Adamova's The Secret of Two Oceans, S. Belyaev's Destroyer 2-Z. Books and stories about a future war appeared. And here the sad paradox occurred: the literature of prediction, expressing the real trends and fears of society, was compelled to fulfill the next social command placed on it from above, and born in the lying unjustified hopes that a country with an economy under mined by the capricious command methods of the leadership, and the army, weakened by the extirpation of its leading cadres, could easily, with one blow, repel any aggressor. The best known books of this type became N. Shpanov's The First Blow and P. Pavlenko's In the East. The authors succesSFully blew the pants off the German fascists and Japanese militarists. Now all that remained was to do it in the real world.

Here is a superb example of the real impact of SF literature on history: millions of copies of these and books similar to them played a somewhat more harmful role in the pre-war period than all real and imagined spies, taken together. This was its own kind of utopia, the "near-sighted" utopia, duplicitous, like mirages in the desert.

The gradual rebirth of SF began toward the end of the Great Patriotic War. In 1944 my mother brought me for my tenth birthday Ivan Efremov's first book of novellas, Five Cubes, which attracted me by its novelty, and which has remained for the rest of my life one of my favorite books. That was when Sergei Belyaev was publishing his best short stories, and Georgij Gurevich was beginning to work. Thus the expression "near-sighted SF," which came to be applied to all Soviet SF in the forties and fifties, was not entirely accurate. The first shoots of doubt were stubbornly breaking through the thick asphalt layer of mandated happiness.

And here is something interesting. Not once at this time, when the creation of the semiofficial utopia would have been, had it even minimal literary qualities, crowned with laurels, did anyone write one. Those SF writers who realized the indissoluble connection of SF with its contemporary world could see no bright future for a society that had lost its faith in its own ideals.The novels and stories of those years, as a rule, were limited to explications of technical problems and scientific progress, or expressed the sad realities of the Cold War and therefore fought as much as possible with overseas spies and diversionists.

Despite this, the first postwar decade saw the publishing of far more books than the ten years preceding the war, and the writers working then contrived to find and express in their books the most important human and social problems of the time.

Society again found the possibility to speak aloud, to think, to search for one's own ideals. It was at that moment that our SF which we read today began; all at once, as it were, our best writers entered literature -- the Strugatskys, A. Dneprov, S. Gansovsky, 1. Varshavsky, A- Poleshchuk, G. Altov, V. Mikhailov and others. It turns out that our land is rich in talents.

But talents simply do not appear overnight. For an entire trend in literature to develop, not only social, but also organizational conditions had to be created.

During the 1960s, an editorial board for science fiction and adventure was created at the Young Guard publishing house. Let us remember how succesSFully it was run for a number of years by S. Zhemaitis, B. Kliueva, S. Mikhailova, and S. Mitrokhina. They founded

the "Contemporary Soviet SF" series in which the books of D. Bilenkin, S. Gansovsky, 1. Varshavsky, G. Gurevich, ADnieprov and many others were published. During those years, the logo of this series guaranteed that the reader held in his hands a good book. These people founded the annual Fantastika. Not only the leading writers were printed, but new authors were allowed to test their strengths. Finally, they were able to create and publish a multivolume "Library of World SF" series.

These banner times gave rise to the first important Soviet utopia: The Andromeda Nebula by Efremov. It could not have appeared earlier -- the social conditions for it did not exist. Other works, in which SF writers tried to peer into the future, were also appearing. An entire cycle of the Strugatskys' novels and stories tells the tale of this future.

But the receptions these books received were strikingly different.

Efremov's novel is a real utopia, an attempt to picture the ideal communist society. Despite the fact that it is thoroughly popular even today, has engendered an enormous number of imitations, and played a very valuable role in the history of our SF, I will venture to declare that it is only an attempt. The society constructed had no real roots in the existing social environment, it was created only on the most general premises, limited to the known formulation "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," and the requirement that it be absolutely humane, devoid even of the hint of exploitation of man by man and so forth and so on -- this led to the rejection of the fundamental principle of SF literature-- its reality. It's impossible to empathize with the novel's heroes because they are not people, only name carriers and necessary functions.

The Strugatskys turned away from utopias as, in principle, an unliving genre, and found a different means of expressing their feelings and thoughts. Not cut off from reality, and not forgetting about its problems, they tried to combine it with their fantasy world, a world which turns out to be a continuation and development of our own world, with emotions and characters which could be the development of our emotions and characters. And therefore, in my view, they found a new form of SF prediction which can neither be called utopia nor antiutopia. It was literature with an historical perspective.

And here new difficulties arose.

Despite the change in the times, new ideas had a hard time breaking through. The publishers were captives of their own childhoods, convinced that SF was a branch of more or less fiction, propagandizing the achievements of science and technology; home grown futurology, but if they predict, well, that's only about the dangers originating abroad.

Since the end of the 1960s, critical articles have been limited nearly to recognitions of the achievements of Ivan Efremov, written to command (and not about his best works, but about The Andromeda Nebula, which opened our eyes to how communism will be); certifications of the merits of V. Obruchev, who composed a series of books on the border between fiction and popular science writing, and sharp attacks against the Strugatskys, who simply can't master the optimistic view of the future.

I understand the guilty phillipics against the Strugatskys' Hard to be a God for its incorrect description of the policies of relationship with underdeveloped nations, The Ugly Swans for the clearly incorrect depiction of the problem of the interrelationships of our fathers and our children. That is, the books were rejected to the extent to which they were recognized as real. By the way, traces of these critiques live on today.

Up to this time, there has existed a strange breach between the formal quantities of SF publications and the quantities of realistic works. On the one hand, the accounts of Goskomizdat (the State Publishing House) and the reviews show a great many numbers of print runs and number of titles. On the other hand, to publish a new book is difficult, to buy one impossible.

The reports and summaries list all books with the SF mark on them. But that means millions of reprints, not only in Moscow, but in the republican and local publishing houses as well: one and two volumes of Jules Verne, Wells, Belyaev, Tolstoy, Kazantsev, Capek, and so forth. The majority of them are good writers; the reader may salute their literary talents, the intrigue, the plotting. But he won't find answers to pressing questions which he hunts for in SF in them.

The percentage of new books of Soviet authors in the general stream of accounts is quite small. Unfortunately, this trend is still dominant. Our book market is so enormous and the demand of the readers for SF is so great, that the publishers could live very well off reprinting Jules Verne and Kazantsev for some time to come; they'll always find buyers. This is the cause of the deficit of young names in SF. It is very difficult for young writers, especially those who live outside of Moscow, to get published. This is the heritage of a complicated situation of business and publishing practice. People will buy any book. There are few publishers.

The last example which, in my view, characterizes the absence of change in our guild, although it has taken place through the rest of society, is the history of the Library of Science Fiction, to be taken on by a number of different publishing houses.

A few years ago Goskomizdat, in response to the readers' urgent requests, took the decision to publish a high-print-run 30-volume library. An editorial board was assembled, which began to work; it found in power a standard attitude toward SF in general and a distrust of Soviet SF. The series was shortened to six volumes; thereafter a considerable part of it was given over to to the oft- reprinted Capek, Wells, and other classics and foreign authors. After that, as several writers refused to participate in such a library, a meeting was held to decide what to do. Thereafter in a condition of half-glasnost, several changes were made in the composition of the library. But the deed was done, and the volumes will be included in the regular optimistic numbers, and there will not be enough paper or printing presses to publish young writers.

Now for the question: what are the chances for a magazine? When will we get one?

I don't know. I only know that we are the only civilized nation which does not have its own SF magazine.

A few years ago, the Central Committee of the Komsomol planned an SF magazine. This went on the back burner because of the lack of printing facilities. In their pronouncements, both writers and readers literally groan: "We want a magazine!" But I see no organization, or some other power, really interested in the creation of such a magazine today. Certainly on its own nothing will be done. We'll have to "rough it," fight for the idea, get the money and a place in the printshops. But there is some competition. Every year a few new publications appear in the country. Perhaps the Council for the affairs of SF and Adventure Fiction of the Union of Writers of the USSR could fight more energetically for this idea, but I imagine that the council today is satiSFied with the way things are. And perhaps my condemnation is unjustified. As a "council of the Union," the body is something vague, without rights and entirely consultative.

There is movement beginning everywhere, and the attitude toward SF in wide layers of society is changing. The publisher of the sixties was fed on prewar regurgitations of the thirties "stone age" SF, but today a generation of Soviet people has already grown who idealize the Strugatskys. For many years now, Mir publishers, despite the difficulties, has familiarized our readers with what our colleagues abroad have wrought. Not so very long ago only popular science magazines like Ural Stalker and Around the World published SF. Today the literary magazines are opening their pages to it. Soviet Wtiter found a place for The Violist Danilov and the Strugatskys' book A Billion Years Before The End of the World.

I hope that tomorrow publishing houses will receive great independence and new people, and will be compelled to take into account the existence of the readers not as hindrances to a quiet life, but as brothers in arms in the common toil.

An example of this already is a series of recent speeches by V. Evdokomov, director of Moscow Worker publishing house, who does not hide his own appreciation of SF or his understanding of its topicality. They have already issued the almanac Orion and are determined to continue it. They have put into their plan a two- volume Strugatsky and plan to publish other SF writers. Even ten years ago this would have been unthinkable. The magazine Chemistry and Life has begun to publish a literary supplement, in which there are a number of SF collections. Also, enormous changes have swept the film industry; there is interest in genre films, as well as social canvases.

Thus I have to find myself expressing guarded optimism.

-Kir Bulychev War of the Words; or, Raising Roadblocks on the Road to the Unknown by John H. Costello

A specter is haunting Soviet science fiction: the specter of glasnost. For some months, writers like the Strugatskys and Kir Bulychev joined Russian SF fans in openly and vocally denouncing the literary establishment that generates more than half of the SF titles published annually in the USSR. The opening shots of the battle were fired at the end of 1986 in the magazine lunost by Vsevolod Revich, who called the bulk of current Soviet SF "nullliterature." The cry was taken up in issue

10 of the magazine V Mire Knig (Book World) by the Strugatskys, who tore into the leadership of Molodaia Gvardia (Young Guard) Publishing House's editorial board for SF. The Strugatskys named names, holding former head of Molodaia Gvardia Yuri Medvedev (now of the magazine Moskva) and present head Vladimir Shcherbakov responsible for destroying the edifice of Soviet SF so painfully constructed in the 1960s, and turning the publisher into a factory for, "null-literature": badly written, badly thought out, cliched ideological pabulum which took up paper and printing press time that could have been spent producing something worth reading.

In the 1960s, Molodaia Gvardia, under the directorship of Sergei Zhemaitis (now on the masthead of the popular science magazine Znanie Sila) and Bela Klyueva had produced many of the titles we in the west had come to associate with Soviet SF. the annual Fantastika, books by the Strugatskys and Bulychev. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel for slandering the Soviet Union (Sinyavsky, who published his fantastic literature in the West under the pen name of Abram Tertz, had written the introduction to the 1964 volume of Pasternak's poetry and was the only noted critic in the country to review Soviet SF; Daniel, who wrote under the pen name of Nikolai Arzhak, produced works which, in the west, would be considered social so, there was a general tightening of censorship and political control over all literature, which lasted through the Brezhnev years. Science fiction had always been suspect, and Znanie Sila had, on several occasions in the 1960s, received extra special attention from Glavlit, the office which oversaw the censorship of Soviet magazines and newspapers.

In some ways, the disaster at Chernobyl may be said to have a silver lining: it convinced the new leadership they only lost prestige and international respect by hiding the truth from their own people.

As perestroika or restructuring became the watchword for the economy, Glasnost or "openness" became the catchphrase for the country's intellectual life, and more and more sectors of Soviet society picked it up. The Writer's Union conferences produced speeches that were finally worth reading. The film makers threw the Brezhnevite old guard from positions of power and proceeded to release films like Repentance and Commissar, and other films which had languished for years in the vaults because they did not fit the party line. The general literary magazines have gone far beyond the expectations of most western observers in their willingness to print and discuss previously banned topics.

Although the government wants the economy to be run more efficiently, with prices to reflect actual costs and supply to meet demand, the publishing industry is not considered a part of the economy, but, rather, a means of ideological control in what remains an ideological state. An earlier plan to allow cooperative publishing houses has been rejected, although the law now says that an author may publish his works himself, if he can get the paper, and printing press time. A publisher must submit a plan showing how many different types of book swill be produced, ranging from the ideologically necessary to the superfluous (murder mysteries, science fiction, etc.). A long-term study of Soviet emigres from the 1960s onward has shown that what the Soviet population wants is the categories of books the state publishing company views as superfluous. Although the publishing houses could make and sell the books people want, that isn't their job; their job is propaganda, which they view in its educational meaning. The editors get their bonuses for meeting their plans, not for selling books. If no one buys the majority of the books they produce, they lose nothing. The books which people do want are often impossible to obtain, except on the black market, and are termed defitsitnyi or "deficit." This has led some emigre publishers in the US to bring out both legally and illegally pirated copies of, for example, the Strugatskys, whose books have been brought out by at least three phantom publishers in the US to meet the emigre demand.

Even if the publishers were willing to produce the books people want to read, they could not. The Soviet Union is suffering from a major paper shortage. Although the USSR has some of the world's largest forests, it also has some of the world's richest farmlands, and the same economic system governs both the production of wheat and the production of newsprint. Perestroika has yet to bring major concrete changes in the Soviet economy, and the Soviet publishing industry has strictly rationed print, which has fostered an old boy backscratching network within the industry. For SF this centers around Molodaia Gvuardia publishing house and its former employees spread throughout the economy.

The focal point for discontent appears to be the 24-volume "SF Library" proposed several years ago. Rather than concentrate on new, young writers, the library will consist 80% of reprint materials. The rest of the Library (after the total volume numbers were reduced) was split up among various approved authors.

This problem is exacerbated by the unwllingness (so far) of the publishing powers to allow an SF magazine which could serve as a forum for readers and writers in the genre Some western fans have commented that this might be a good thing, and help prevent the ghettoization of Soviet SF, which is published widely. In fact, the bulk of it comes out in popular science magazines, and the situation seems to be the same as in the West: really wellwritten literature can be printed anywhere, but most SF remains so highly specialized that it is inaccessible to most readers, and demands a specialty area.

Molodaia Gvardia, in an apparent attempt to placate the dissidents, proposed to come out with New Directions SF, but the newspaper NTR reported, "The authors participating have yet to be determined, but it has already become known that the readers will not see the most popular names there. The brothers Stru gatsky, Evgeny Voiskunsky, Kir Bulychev and others have officially refused to participate.... They explained their refusal to our correspondent by a disinclination to collaborate with the present SF editorial board of Molodaia Gvardia."

In the Spring of this year, Kir Bulychev was voted representative for the Association of SF and Adventure writers of the Union of Writers of the Russian Federation (RSFSR), as, in effect, a reform candidate proposed by the writers. The Adventure and SF writers were to meet in Moscow in July; among the topics they were todiscusswere access to print for younger writers and the chances of creating an SF magazine.

John H. Costello