Soviet Sci-Fi

The Soviet Union believed in the future officially, so its science fiction had a strange job: dreaming in a country where the dream was already state property.

It began in 1924 with Aelita, a silent about a revolution on Mars, staged in constructivist sets three years before Metropolis. The thaw sent up cosmonaut pictures like Planet of Storms, whose footage American producers quietly bought and recut with new actors. Then Tarkovsky turned the genre inward, and Solaris and Stalker made outer space and the Zone into places a man meets his own conscience. And in 1986, the year of Chernobyl, two of the bleakest Soviet films ever made both imagined the end of the world: one a comedy, Kin-dza-dza!, and one shot in the colour of ash, Dead Man’s Letters.