“The Struggle of the Worlds”: the Representation of the Future War in the Soviet Science Fiction of the 1930s

In pre-revolutionary fiction, the struggle of the worlds was perceived mainly as a clash between earthlings and an extraterrestrial civilization. After the emergence of the Soviet state, the struggle between the Bolshevik and antiBolshevik worlds became one of the key themes in fiction. By the early 1930s, the formula “struggle of the worlds” existed in Russian literature both as fantastic and non-fantastic, reflecting a real social confrontation. However, the idea of a world revolution as the goal and result of the struggle of the worlds is actually eliminated from science fiction. The social struggle, which can transform into an interstate conflict, by the end of the 1930s turns into a war of the worlds, where the military clash between the USSR and a hostile state is the decisive factor. The changes taking place in the international arena led to the fact that in science fiction, too, England and France are replaced by Germany, Italy and Japan as the main opponents. In the war of the future the victory is determined not by heroism and national unity, but also by military and technical superiority. Along with the apparently fantastic weapons possessed by both the USSR and the enemies in the future, the writers described technical achievements, whose fantastic nature is not always noticeable even to a non-specialist contemporary, since some weapons that were fantastic in the late 1930s already became a reality during the Great Patriotic War. One of the distinctive features of the works of 1938–1939 about the future war is the minimal differentiation between the fantastic and non-fantastic. On the one hand, there is no war yet, on the other hand, the distance between the future and the present is practically absent, and the “effect of the future” is leveled due to image of reality that maximally corresponds to the present. This artistic technique helps to convey to the reader the confidence that victory is the logical conclusion of the present, and not a fantasy.