The following section appeared in the August, 1991 issue of Locus magazine. Even by that time it was out date; the USSR was due for the chop. The addresses are all at least twelve years old, but are included for historical interest. JHC
Readers familiar with events in the USSR will not be at all surprised that letters dated from January, sent airmail, only started to arrive in the US from mid-April onward. Airmail is sent in bags loaded individually on planes, but surface mail is accumulated in containers and is sent when the container is full. Unfortunately, the Soviets frequently just dump everything into the surface routes. Very few Soviet magazines or newspapers of any kind arrived in the US during the early part of 1991, although Pravda and Izvestia were not affected. Much of my information comes from the "legitimate" press, and it simply wasn't showing up. Some magazines are not even being printed because of the paper shortage. Only nine issues of Novy Mir made it off the presses last year, the paper for its distinctive blue covers was diverted to publishing the proceedings of the new Soviet parliament. Some magazines have cut back their print runs because of the shortages. Ile Soviet postal system has become increasingly lax - Kir Bulychev mentioned in one letter that newspapers are being delivered a day late and that the Sunday newspapers are not being delivered at all. But none of this explains why the newspapers and magazines least likely to support the Soviet government are usually going by sea.
Sergey Berezhnoj writes from Sevastopol that two full-time professional sf magazines have finally appeared in the USSR. The first, Fantakrim-MEGA published in Minsk, contains more than a dozen stories by Soviet and Polish authors. "Perhaps the magazine will succeed in coming out six times a year, although I doubt this knowing the terrible situation with paper and printing presses. The print run is 100,000 copies, but even with this enormous print run the issue will have a tough time being profitable - paper and printing cost so much, and the price three roubles 50 kopeks - is somewhat high.
"Almost at the same time, the first issue of the quarterly Zavtra [Tomorrow], published by the Moscow cooperative 'Tekst' came out. It's edited by Vitalij Babenko. Ile issueprinted oneof thegreatest satirical anti-utopias -Vladislav Zadorozhny's 'Zashchita ot duraka' [A Defense from Fools], which promises to be one of the chief events of the year in SovietSF Oversun Inform
25, dated Feb 12,1991, carried the following information:
The editors of the annual Polifen were offering the collections Polifien-89 and The 1990 Polifen Competition. The collections are magazine-sized and run several hundred pages (36 Soviet printer's sheets at 14pages per printer's sheet) at eight roubles per copy. Address: Aleksandr Garrievich Chegurov, ul. Sovictskaia 70, Tbilisi, Georgia 380064 USSR.
The sf fan club "Tsivileatsiia Gejm" produced the sixth issue of their fanzine Khabar Articles on "Fandom in the USSR in the Post-Brezhnev Period." on st authors in the Orenburg, Arkhangelsk and Cheliabinsk regions, etc. Price ten roubles per copy. Andress M. B. Taskaev, ul. Petrozavodskaia 56, kv. 130, Syktyvkar 167005 USSR.
The first issue of Nauka Fantastika [Science Fiction] from Kiev includes an article on the founding of Ukrainian A by V. M. Vladko, and part one of Vladimir Savchenko's "Vizit sdvinutorn fazianki". Published in Ukrainian, Available through Soyuzpechat, the Soviet state monopoly distributor.
Polius [Polar Star] a quasi-newspaper from Tomsk, has E. Mikhailov's "Barabanshki rasbushevalis" [The Drummers in Fury] and an excerpt from George R.R. Martin's Chuminaia Zvezda [Plague Star]. Print run 1,500 copies, price 20 kopeks, address: Polius, Pl. Kirova 2, kom. 202, Tomsk 634050 USSR.
The "Homo Ludens" group and the All-Union Council of SFFan Clubs jointly published the brochure Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A bibllography. VoL 1. It covers the writers' fiction, articles, speeches, and interviews from 1956 to August 1990. The second volume, dealing with articles about the Strugatskys, is now being prepared. Address: Vadim I lurevich Kazakov, ul. Pugachevskaia, 110 kv. 47, Saratov 410600 USSR.
The fourth edition of Informatsionnaia Svodka KLF MGU [The Moscow State University SF Club's Information Summary] contains an article on the illegaltrip ofoneof the club members, Aian Oorzhak, I to Japan. They are planning to run luri Savchenko's Worldcon (Hague 1990) trip report in their next issue. Address: luri S. Savchenko, (KLF MGU) Poste Restante, MGU, Leninskie Gory, Moskva 117234 USSR. No price listed.
The first issue of English-languagc fanzine Contact (the title is drawn from Murray Leinster's "First Contact") contained con reports - an account of Lithuaniacon-90 held in the Vilnius planetarium, and an account of the 1990 Aelita Awards. It also has information on opening businesses or introducing products in the USSR, and on a hotel co-op much cheaper than the state-run Hotel Intourist. Write SF Club 'Dorado,' Planetarium, Ukmerges 12a, Z32005 Vilnius, Lithuania. Given the current situation, it would still be wise to add USSR to the address.
A letter from Sergey Berezhnoj (dated 1-24, re- ceived 4-15) enclosed Oberkham 2, which included a translation of Robert Silverberg's letter to Locus regarding the publicationof LordValentine's Castle in Omsk,and an explanation tothe readerswhatwas going on (See Chertkov's letter in Locus 363). Issue
1 included a parody movie review of "Hard to be a God, Part li," and a Worldcon (Voldkon) trip report by Aleksandr Korotkevich. Soviet fanzines are, as a rule, intensely political compared with their American counterparts, and these are no exceptions. Some are becoming dating, referring to the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 as a "coup" rather than as the Great October Socialist Revolution.
Sizif
3 from Leningrad is dedicated to VyacheslavRybakov, one of the more popularyoung writers (co-author of the script with Arkady Strugatsky for Letters to a Dead Man); Sizif published the first version of his long novelette Doverle [Trust], which had been seized by the KGB years before and then inexplicably returned. In the meantime, Rybakov had completely reconstructed and re-written the story from memory, eventually publishing it in Ural in 1989. The publication will allow readers to compare the two texts. The story deals with an "ideal" communist society which is slowly turned into a dictatorship. The political content is underlined by the quotations beginning each chapter, which come from Marx and Engels, Lenin, official Communist Party pronouncements of the 1970s, and Ecclesiastes.
Oversun
20 carried the announcement that the fan press "Oddisej" in Odessa would, at the end of 1990 and the start of 1991, publish the following books:
Sheckley, Robert, Immortality, Inc.; Laumer, Keith, Dinosaur Beach. Stories; Vance,Jack, Queen of Dragons, The Last Castle, Big Planet; Saberhagen, Fred, Brother Berserker, Niven, Larry, Ringworld; Pohl, Frederik, and Jack Williamson, The Reefs of Space; Norton, Andre, The Star Country; Harrison, Harry, They Make The Stainless Steel Rat; Farmer, Philip Jose, Flesh; Zelazny, Roger, Jack of Shadows, Stories. The projected price per volume was expected to be seven to ten roubles. I
f Roger Zelazny or someone else would like to get his hands on the first two volumes of "The Chronicles of Amber," they'll set him back 15 roubles, and he should hurry since it was a limited press run. Write to Sergej E. Borovikov, Kv. 12, No 15 ul. Chajkovskogo, Leningrad USSR 191187.
The magazines in 1990 carried Damon Knight's "TheBigBoom" (Smena [WorkShift Change]
11); an Alan Dean Foster story "The Fireflies" ["Svetlichki" in Russian] (Around The World
10) and George R.R. Martin's "With Morning Comes Mistfall" (Chemistry and Life
11).
Ural will print Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange and Ursula IC Le Guin's Na Stanke Mirozdania The Lathe of the Universe", rather than"of Heaven"] inl991.Zvezda [Star]announced it would print Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night. But lest you be shocked by the discerning taste of Soviet fans, you should know that the Volokolamsk club "Fevol" was getting ready to translate 30 issues of "Perry Rhodan" and "Perry Rhodan Planet Novels". John Costello
On April 12, 1 received the following letter from Kir Bulychev in Moscow, dated and postmarked 18 January 1991 (shortly after the Soviet Army retook the tv station in Vilnius, Lithuania). It took three months to arrive, although marked "Air Mail" and "Express.,,
"Dear John!
"I got back from a trip to Poland three days ago, but it's only now that I've had a chance to write to you. While in Poland we started to get the news about Lithuania, and just now the Persian Gulf events have been added, not to mention other unpleasantries.
"As an American, I'm certain you'll find it completely incomprehensible - however wise you may be in our ways - that I traveled to Poland not only to sign contracts and to meet my translators, but also to buy a jacket and pair of boots, because it's been a year now since I've been able to do that at home.
"The whole world is sending us packages crammed with canned goods, but they rarely reach people who, are actually in need -they reach the people who already have enough to eat without the gifts. Thus while I need boots and a jacket I haven't been able to get them, since I don't belong to either the Party Apparatus or the Mafia.
"The situation is quite terrible; the government has aligned itself with the most reactionary forces in our society, and the Supreme Soviet is completely subservient to the government.
"As soon as I got back, I received a telephone call from my translator in Vilnius; she simply wanted to hear the voice of someone from the outside world to find out if we knew what's been going on, or if we continue to live in ignorance. The saddest fact is that, while in Poland, I knew and learned ten times as much what was happening than what they are showing on television here.
"Right now is simply not a time for sf. I'm thinking in terms of the European past: there was an increase in sf writing before the last war, there was an explosion of activity after the war, but people grew silent during the conflict.
"...But it is warm in Poland now, and their stores are selling chocolate and sausages. We're making do with Turkish tea. So I've aimed my antenna so I can listen and look at CNN and I can hear the voices of their announcers coming from the kitchen now, along with American generals...
"I always find it strange that we keep exchanging letters that keep passing each other in transit for the most important parts of our lives, the timewhen the events we are only beginning to think about and fear are coming to pass. You'll get this letter and everything may be all right in the world, or so muddled there's nothing that can be done.
"And it will be interesting to know if you're laughing now, having read my lines, or are you nodding youtheadsadly?Or perhapsour militarycensors never sent the letter on to you and you'll never get it?" -Kir Bulychev, [trans. John Costello]
The Efremov Lectures - a series of meetings dedicated to the theory and practical problems of writing sf, named after Ivan Efremov, author of Andromeda and "Heart of a Serpent" - are held annually in the Soviet Union. The Lectures draw writers, critics, as well as researchers, not to mention a large number of fans, principally as audience and not as lecturers. TheLectures alternate among three cities: Nikolaev, Moscow, and Leningrad.
The 4th Efremov Lectures took place in Nikolaev, April 8-12,1991. The organizers invited more than 100 participants and about 30 papers; however, due to the rising prices of airplane and train tickets, many writers and researchers were compelled to cancel their travel plans literally at the last moment. Despite this, some people did make it - Sergey Snegov, authorof the classic 1960s space opera Men Like Gods, as well as Andrey Stolyarov, Leonid Panasenko and Vasily Golovachev. The critic Vladimir Gopman chaired the meetings.
The theme was Utopias and Dystopias in literature, The USSR is currentlyin a critical situation, so this theme, for both the near and distant future, was at the center of attention for the conference's participants. Ile paper of Konstantin Rublev (an instructor at the teachers' college in Semipalatinsk) served as the basis for a lengthy discussion. He traced the motifs of utopia and dystopia in Soviet period Russian literature. After Stalinist ideology had suffocated the preexisting local social sf, Utopiasonlygot outof theviseof ideologyin 1957,when Ivan Efremov published one of the fundamental communist utopias, "TheAndromeda Nebula". The Dystopia was rehabilitated only after the start of allowed the publication of Zemyatin's We, Huxley's Have New World and Orwell's 1984,along with other works that were under official ban.
It was remarkable to everyone that a true belief in the inevitability of the existence of a utopian model for the future of social thought was demonstrated by a man who spent 17 years imprisoned in Stalin's camps, Sergey Snegov. It would seem that all he survived should have sapped his belief in the realization of utopian ideals. Snegov, however, said that it was actually in the camp itself that he became convinced of the greatness and purity of the human spirit, because it was here that he became acquainted with people who became for him the living embodiment of the Human Future. Unfortunately, few of them survived to be liberated, let alone rehabilitated....
The uncertainty of the situation in which the USSR finds itself has given birth to numerous sf works set in the immediate future. As a rule, the authors paint this future in anything but rosy terms. Aleksandr Kabakov's Neyozrashchenets [The Defector] became one of the first examples of this wave of literature. Of the clearer Dystopian stories, one might consider Viacheslav Rybakov's "Ne uspct" [No Exit] and Ludmila Petrushevskaya's "Novye Robinzony" [The New Robinsons]. All these stories were frequently mentioned in the discussions.
The theme of Utopia and Dystopia was closed with the reading of an exhaustively complete paper of Vladimir Gopman, in which the development of these two trends in literature were analyzed over the course of the 20th century. Gopman summarized virtually everything of importance from the other lectures, imparting to the entire construction the strictness of a scientific theory.
The organizers of the Efremov lectures expecting the arrival of a number of foreign guests from Bulgaria, France, and Great Britain - for a number of different reasons none of them were able to take part in the conference. I should hope, by the way, that foreign professionals and fans would be much more interested in attending a large sf con in the USSR rather than a scientific seminar of literary critics. In September of 1991, the first international convention in the USSR will take place in Volgograd with noted writers from Britain, the USA and other countries attending - VolgaCon '91 organized by Boris Zavgorodny.
- Sergey Berezhnoj, translated by John Costello