It Gets Better
On June 9, 2021, Konstantin Syomin (Semin) posted a brief video to his AgitProp YouTube channel. Five months later, it had been viewed 47, 807 times (as of December 11, 2021), and received 877 comments (nearly all made within a few days of its posting). The volume of response is actually on the lower side for Syomin. A popular journalist who initially made his reputation on the liberal-leaning Vesti news program, he has since become a Marxist with strong nationalist leanings. Agitprop, which started as a broadcast on Russia-24 in 2014, moved entirely to Youtube in 2019 after a falling out with the station's management.[1] The channel has 136,000 subscribers, touching hot-button issues such as Belarusian protests, opposition figure Alexei Navalny, and the rapper Oxxxymiron.
This particular video was devoted to a niche issue, directed explicitly at fellow Leftists, but with the fantasy and science fiction community implicated as well: "Why is the Image of the Radiant Future Useless for AgitProp?" Syomin situates himself within what he calls an "ongoing argument" among "YouTubers, bloggers, and propagandists," with his comments occasioned by the recent release of an animated video imagining a prosperous USSR in the year 2040 (more on that in a bit). Syomin sees little point in such exercises:
[t]he very idea of competing with liberals or fascists on this level by trying to paint a picture of paradise strikes me as incorrect, because [to get there] there will be a revolution... which means that prior to [the revolution] there will be a period of terrible, awful upheaval, with struggle, loss. [...] This heavenly image that we are collectively trying to convey is [...] a deception. [...] People will be pushed towards socialism not by the dream of a wonderful, happy, and prosperous life, but by the realization that the disgusting horrifying, intolerable reality can't go on. Because the natural world has been ruined, because of poverty, hunger, illness, war and unemployment. These are the horses of the apocalypse to come when it becomes clear that the fork in the road between socialism and barbarism is unavoidable. There will be a choice between barbarism or socialism, and we must agitate for non-barbarism.
In rejecting the very idea of optimistic futurism, Syomin manages to be both in and out of step with his time. Given the dominance of dystopian and postapocalyptic storytelling, an aesthetic preference for a dismal future would situate him within the mainstream of public taste in both Russia and the West. In the battle between what young adult authors Holly Black and Justine Larbaleister called "Zombies vs. Unicorns" (the title of their 2010 tongue-in-cheek anthology), horror and destruction beat rainbows and puppy dogs nine times out of ten. [2]. But when we shift to politics, the ground beneath us shifts as well. How many fans of The Walking Dead view the television show or comic as a compelling roadmap for a future they wish to build? The (post)apocalypse is a nice place to (vicariously) visit, but no one really wants to live there.
Notes
[1] Short for "Agitation and Propaganda," "Agitprop" is a term that dates back to the early Soviet days, referring to the use of popular media to make the case for communism
[2] So much so that ironic positivity becomes the stuff of subcultures, like the "Brony" phenomenon, in which adult men as avid fans of My Little Pony.