The inventors of the progressors

The brothers Arkadij and Boris Strugatsky on the balcony of Arkadij's apartment in Moscow around 1980

In superficial retrospect, the development of the Soviet Union after the Second World War usually appears as the inevitable decline of a gray and horrible empire of militarism and stupidity. But especially in the years after what was perceived as such a “Sputnik shock” within NATO, which was triggered by the launch of the first Soviet satellite in 1957, people in the West were not only worried about potentially threatening missiles.

Also in 1957, the CPSU General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev announced for the first time that he would soon catch up and overtake the USA in terms of productivity and the supply of consumer goods. As is well known, this did not work, but supply in the USSR actually improved, and in the West at the time system competition was seen as a serious challenge. In 1960, the US magazine Foreign Affairs recalled "the plight of observers in other areas" who underestimated the Soviet Union "and then found that the Russians had actually 'caught up' despite everything."

The Strugatskys followed the popular belief that a civilization would destroy itself through war or environmental catastrophe if it did not reach sufficient ethical maturity.

Many people in the Soviet Union also had higher hopes - for a washing machine, but also for more freedom and reforms, which in the long term could possibly even lead to something like the promised communism. After all, millions of political prisoners had been released as part of de-Stalinization, and the policy of the “thaw” (the title of a 1954 novel by Ilja Ehrenburg became synonymous with this period) allowed greater artistic freedom.

Until the end of 1962. In November, “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, the first work of the later ostracized and persecuted writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn about life in the Gulag. But in December, Khrushchev was having a really bad day or, more likely, making a "His Majesty is angry, beware" style performance. In the Moscow exhibition complex “Manege” he waxed wild and vulgar about the “abstractionism” of the paintings exhibited there. The message was clear: all arts should once again follow the party line and “socialist realism”.

This also affected two brothers who had only been active as writers for a few years: Arkadij and Boris Strugatsky. Until then, you had written rather optimistic literature about the future, primarily about a 22nd century without annoying bureaucrats and material hardships, in which communists explore space. This made for some attractive short stories, but wasn't particularly dramatic in terms of drama. In a way, it was Khrushchev who got the Strugatskys going.

"If for us communism is the world of freedom and creativity, then for them it is a society where the population immediately and with great enthusiasm carries out everything that the party and government prescribe." Boris Strugatsky

Arkadij Strugatsky, born in 1925, died in 1991. Boris, born in 1933, lived until 2012 and wrote commentary afterwords for the six-volume German-language edition published by Heyne, which not least describe the conflicts with bureaucracy and censorship. "We are ruled by scoundrels and enemies of culture," is how he sums up the campaign that began at the end of 1962. »They will never allow us to say what we think is right because they think something completely different is right. And if for us communism is the world of freedom and creativity, then for them it is a society where the population immediately and enthusiastically carries out everything that the party and the government prescribe.

The Strugatskys' work probably also influenced the fact that many intellectuals seem to have been waiting for such a campaign. "All these scary creatures of Stalin and Beria" (Stalin's secret service chief), said Boris Strugatsky, "suddenly crawled out of their holes, they were all there, energetic, clever, skillful hyenas of the pen, alligators of the typewriter." The Strugatskys stuck to their humanistic idealism, but their doubts apparently grew about their optimism, for which the emergence of a "new human being" was self-evident.

“New ideas emerged,” says Boris Strugatsky, and it became clear to the brothers that the novel “It's Hard to Be a God” (1964), which was initially planned as an adventure story, needed a more serious tone. It was now supposed to be “a novel about the fate of the intelligentsia, which is immersed in the twilight of the Middle Ages.” However, on the advice of a colleague, the Strugatskys refrained from naming the central villain of the novel "Don Rebija" - he became Don Reba, because otherwise the reference to Beria would have been all too obvious.

The Strugatskys' work is extremely diverse: satire on the Soviet bureaucracy ("The Tale of the Troika"), the question of the meaning and necessity of resistance ("The Second Invasion of the Martians"), stories that oscillate somewhere between Monty Python and Kafka ("Unrest", "The Experiment") and much more. At the heart of the work, however, are the novels in which communist humanity encounters planets whose humanoid populations live and suffer in class societies (along with “It's Hard to Be a God,” especially “The Inhabited Island”).

The Strugatskys' future society has some similarities to "Star Trek communism", and not just because there is beaming (here it is called "zero transport"). There are functional hierarchies, but also some influences from the (Soviet) era reflected by Boris Strugatsky in the Heyne edition of his works. Women are professional and intellectual, but remain in the background. And the favorite hobby of communist humanity is hunting. Otherwise, people devote themselves to three areas of activity that can be understood in the broadest sense: art, science and engineering. Apart from a small group that works in development aid for distant class societies.

The Strugatskys' future society has some similarities to "Star Trek communism", and not just because there is beaming (here it is called "zero transport").

What to do? Social progress cannot be forced through superior military technology. After many debates and a few experiments, it was decided to proceed cautiously: “progressors” were infiltrated into important positions; their main aim was to promote education. But what if Don Reba orders the murder of all scholars?

The science fiction genre wasn't an easy area for censors either. On the one hand, the global victory of communism was self-evident, but on the other hand, the Soviet Union did not officially interfere in the affairs of other states. This also made the Progressors suspicious, because no matter how beneficial their work might be, they were already something like secret agents. In the Middle Ages this could just about pass, but the world in “The Inhabited Island” knows nuclear weapons and tanks. At first the censorship was a bit sleepy, but then 896 changes were made to the magazine version of "The Inhabited Island" published in 1969 for the novel approved in 1971. One of the strange solutions: The main character had to give up the Russian name Maksim Rostislavskij and instead take the German name Maxim Kammerer.

Kammerer is also the main character in two, so to speak, final works (“The Beetle in the Anthill” and “The Waves Stifle the Wind”) in which people have to come to terms with the fact that they themselves may have become the object of development aid. The Strugatskys followed the view, widespread in East and West during the Cold War, that a civilization would destroy itself through nuclear war or environmental catastrophe before entering the interstellar age if it did not reach sufficient ethical maturity. So you don't have to worry about meeting Darth Vader or the Klingons in space.

But there are the "Wanderers," a presumably non-humanoid, technologically far superior civilization that has left the area populated and explored by humans, but left behind relics that could influence human life. Will humanity, which considers itself progressive enough, become an area of application for the Wanderer Progressors? How should, may, must she react? Faced with threat – or misunderstood promise? – there are relapses into patterns that were long thought to have been overcome.

The question of what the Strugatskys would have written without censorship is interesting, but difficult to answer even speculatively. Their universe is a product of the Soviet Union – undoubtedly one of the best. Their books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and in the USSR the brothers were among the most successful and influential authors with a total circulation of 50 million. Since the editions did not meet demand, they were also distributed as samizdat literature - a special distinction.