Empire State
Zubkov's Carbongrad stands out from the crowd for many reasons, but one of the most important, if least immediately obvious, involves geography. His futuristic Russia comfortably fits within the current maps of the country. Far from being expansionist, it retreats to the Russian heartland. William Gibson, one of the fathers of cyberpunk, famously asserted that "the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." Carbongrad is a gentle, optimistic rebuttal: the future will make it even to the Russian provinces.
It is also a rejoineder to the most prominent trends in post-Soviet Russian futuristic thought. Again and again, Russia's future depends on political hegemony and geographic expansionism. A positive vision of tomorrow's Russia usually has the trappings of empire.
Fortunately, empire (in both its Russian and Eurasianist forms) is one of the most commonly studied themes in post-Soviet F&SF, probably because it is both prevalent and timely. Eurasianism is a particularly productive framework for alternate Russias rooted in significantly different histories: Holm van Ziaichik's multivolume Eurasian Symphhny, for example, which is a series of mysteries set in the conjoined "OrdRuss" Empire (a merger of Russia and China), while Pavel Krusanov's The Angel's KIss charts a similarly Eastern path for Russia's imperial development.
Curiously, there are two important, overlapping, but ideologically contradictory visions of a Russian imperial future that is not based on a particularly Eurasian vision turn, instead, to the Russian middle ages: Mikhail Yurev's The Third Empire and Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik. Less Sovpunk than Medieval Punk, these books are an exercise in double extrapolation: they obviously use a medieval framework, but that is also in the service of building on then-contemporary political and ideological trends. These two authors' goals are, of course, in complete contradiction with each other. Yurev imagine a repressive hegemonic medieval Russia as a utopia, part of a grand vision for the world in which there is no room for anything that is not grand. Sorokin, by contrast, has created a dystopia that is as compelling in its own way as 1984. Yet each is using the same historical and fantastic source material.
There is nothing novel about writing about these two authors together; the commonalities are too obvious to ignore. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it is The Third Empire that has gotten more renewed attention, for, as several critics have noted, the book looks like a pretty precise blueprint for Putin's bloody war. I would not deny the accuracy of this comparison, but I am always concerned when criticism lapses into the familiar and problematic pattern of analyzing science fiction in terms of how well it predicts the future. The important thing about The Third Empire is not that the author somehow got it right, but that he and his ideological opponents correctly laid bare the ideological forces animating Putinism.
As Maria Snegovaya notes, The Third Empire is not just medieval futurism; it reflects a set of ideas that have currency in both Russian and the West. The Third Empire is a utopia that is medieval in form, but Huntingtonian in content. In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington insisted that, in the wake of the Cold War, history would be driven by the conflicts among civilizations rather than ideologies or nations, primarily the "West" (basically NATO and its partners), Latin America, the Muslim world, the "East" (Asia minus Australia and New Zealand), sub-Saharan Africa, and the Orthodox world.
Huntington's thesis is important not for the soundness of his ideas (whose oversimplification, arbitrariness, and underlying racism have been repeatedly demonstrated), but for their appeal and influence. The allure of Huntington is emotional, political, and aesthetic; it is as much a politicized fandom as the Russian Internet denizens who insist that Tolkien's Orcs can be turned into a positive image of Russian power. In each case, the best question to be asked is: what is it about that person's worldview that makes these ideas so attractive?
Huntington has proven so popular in Putin's Russia as to suggest a useful adaptation for Huntington's thesis: Putninism is a Huntingtonian civilization. As a work of speculation,The Clash of Civilizations is somewhere between geopolitical cosplay and an extended tournament of Risk; as a framework influencing leaders of actually countries (let alone nuclear powers), it becomes even more disturbing when the war toys deployed in the game are not, in fact, toys. But for the narrative to truly take hold, it must repeat itself in endless iterations, and preferably localized ones. Yurev's Third Empire does the important ideological labor of moving Huntington from political theory (i.e, "science") to the realm of national myth, which is encoded so well in Russian fantasy and science fiction. Once Huntingtonism is Russified by means of the fantasy genre, it can re-enter Russian discourse as an explicitly Russian phenomenon, presenting Huntington's Clash of Civilizations as a ideological structure that was always already essential to Russian statehood (the medieval past) and crucial to Russian future (in the Third Empire).