Yakov Protazanov and the origins of Soviet science fiction

The Revolutionary Frame and the Borrowed Future

You are standing in a Moscow cinema in 1924, and the film unspooling before you is asking you to believe two contradictory things simultaneously: that the revolution has already won, and that it must still be fought, this time on Mars.

The paradox was not accidental. Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita, released that year by Mezhrabpom-Rus studio, was the first major Soviet science fiction film, and it arrived carrying a freight of borrowed machinery — narrative, visual, ideological — that its makers either did not notice or did not care to acknowledge. The constructivist stage designs by Alexandra Exter owe more to European modernism than to anything born from October. The melodramatic love triangle at the film’s center could have been lifted from the serialized bourgeois fiction the new state was supposedly dismantling. And the science fiction frame itself, the rockets, the alien queen, the imagined civilization ripe for liberation, descended not from Bolshevik theory but from H.G. Wells, from Jules Verne, from a Western genre tradition built on imperial adventure dressed in the language of progress.

This inheritance matters because Soviet cultural authorities spent enormous energy insisting on the absolute rupture between pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary life. Lenin’s 1905 essay “Party Organisation and Party Literature” had already argued that literature must become a gear in the great mechanism of the socialist movement, functional and subordinate. By 1924, that demand had not yet hardened into the totalizing doctrine of Socialist Realism — that would come with the 1934 First Congress of Soviet Writers — but the pressure was already present, ambient, structuring what could be imagined and what could be shown. Protazanov had returned to Russia only in 1923, after years of émigré filmmaking in Paris and Prague, and he brought with him habits of storytelling that belonged to a different world. The Soviet state needed his technical competence. It could not fully control what his competence had been trained to produce.

What Aelita performs, almost despite itself, is ideological ventriloquism: the Bolshevik state speaking the language of utopia through a form whose grammar encoded entirely different assumptions. Science fiction as a Western genre was structurally optimistic about individual agency — the hero travels, discovers, transforms. That structure survived intact into Protazanov’s Mars sequences, where the Soviet engineer Los leads a workers’ uprising against the Martian ruling class. The uprising looks revolutionary. But it is driven by a single man’s obsession, by his fantasy of the alien queen Aelita, by desire rather than collective will. Marxist-Leninist theory had no room for this architecture of the self as motor of history, yet here it was, projected onto a screen in front of an audience the state was simultaneously trying to reshape into something collective and selfless.

The film’s resolution attempted to contain the contradiction: Los wakes, the Martian adventure is revealed as daydream, and he returns to productive Soviet life. Critics at the time, including those writing in the journal Kino-Nedelia, read this ending as a rebuke to escapism, a demand that the audience resist the seduction of fantasy and face material reality. But the rebuke arrives only after two hours of immersive, visually sumptuous fantasy have already done their work on the viewer’s nervous system. You cannot unsee Alexandria Exter’s geometric costumes, cannot unfeel the pull of that alien world. The ending instructs; the film itself seduces. And in that gap between instruction and seduction, something historically significant was quietly happening — not the triumph of socialist art over bourgeois form, but the demonstration that form always carries its origins inside it, resistant to the new meanings you pour in from above.

Constructivism, Costume, and the Aesthetics of Elsewhere

You walk into a room where every angle refuses to let your eye rest. The walls lean. The furniture asserts itself. The light arrives from directions that daylight never chooses. Before a single word of dialogue has been spoken, before any character has explained where or when they are, you already know you are somewhere that does not yet exist — and more unsettling, somewhere that believes in itself with a ferocity the present cannot match.

Alexandra Exter arrived at the problem of the future having already dismantled the past. Her work in Kyiv and Moscow in the years following 1914 moved through Cubism and Futurism the way a fire moves through a building — consuming structure, leaving energy. By the time she designed the costumes and sets for Protazanov’s 1924 film Aelita, she had already spent years in the theatrical avant-garde, collaborating with the Kamerny Theatre and developing a visual language in which cloth, volume, and line were not ornamental decisions but argumentative ones. Her costumes for the Martian sequences are not costumes in any decorative sense. They are propositions. The angular headdresses, the geometric layering of fabric, the way the human silhouette is broken into competing planes — these are not images of the future dreamed by someone looking forward. They are images produced by someone who understood that the present was already structurally dishonest, and that form could expose what language concealed.

Constructivism as a movement had staked a specific claim: that art divorced from material production was a form of aristocratic leisure that the revolution had rendered obsolete. Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky — each in different registers argued that design was not the surface of ideology but its skeleton. What Exter introduced into Aelita was something the Constructivist program had not fully anticipated: the possibility that form, once unleashed into a fictional elsewhere, becomes autonomous. The Martian world she built did not illustrate Soviet doctrine. It competed with it. The geometry of her Mars implied a social order governed by visual logic rather than dialectical materialism, by proportion rather than the party line. The film’s political narrative demanded that Mars be liberated by a Bolshevik hero and re-absorbed into the revolutionary telos. Exter’s design quietly refused this absorption. Her Martians looked like they had already arrived somewhere — somewhere the revolution was still promising to go.

This is the structural trap that science fiction in any authoritarian context cannot escape. The genre requires the imagination of elsewhere, and elsewhere, by definition, exceeds the sanctioned narrative of the present. Soviet cultural authorities in 1924 were not yet the apparatus they would become under Zhdanov’s aesthetic decrees of 1934, which would codify Socialist Realism as mandatory doctrine and effectively terminate the avant-garde experiment in official culture. But the tension was already present and already productive. Protazanov’s film was criticized almost immediately for its bourgeois romanticism, for the very interiority of its dreaming protagonist, for the way desire kept escaping toward Mars rather than toward the collective. What the critics identified as a failure of political commitment was in fact the genre’s fundamental metabolism: science fiction does not illustrate the future its makers believe in; it excavates the future they cannot help imagining.

Exter left the Soviet Union in 1924, the same year Aelita was released, settling eventually in Paris where she continued designing for theatre and teaching at Fernand Léger’s academy. The timing is not coincidental in any dramatic sense — she had been planning to leave — but it carries a resonance that the film itself cannot quite contain. The most radical visual intelligence in the room had already understood that the room was becoming smaller, and that the geometry of elsewhere was not a gift she could afford to leave behind.

The Technician of Dreams: Protazanov Between Tsarist and Soviet Cinema

You learn the rules of a new country the way you learn the rules of a new employer: by discovering, slowly, which of your old habits will be tolerated and which will get you killed. Yakov Protazanov had spent the years between 1914 and 1923 making films in Tsarist Russia, then fleeing to Paris and Berlin as the revolution swallowed everything familiar, then returning — carefully, deliberately — to work under the very political apparatus that had rendered his earlier career ideologically suspect. He was not a convert. He was a professional who had decided that the only honest thing left to do was to keep making films, regardless of who was signing the contracts.

His pre-revolutionary output was commercially shrewd and emotionally sophisticated: melodramas, literary adaptations, psychological portraits drawn from Tolstoy and Pushkin that trusted the audience to sit with ambiguity rather than resolve it. By 1916 he had directed over fifty films, and Pikovaya Dama, his adaptation of Pushkin’s novella, had demonstrated something that Soviet aesthetics would later find deeply uncomfortable — that the irrational, the obsessive, and the privately suffering individual could generate cinema of tremendous formal power without any collective redemptive arc whatsoever. The film ends in madness. Nobody is saved. Nothing is built. The screen goes dark on a man destroyed by his own desire for a system he thought he could master.

When Protazanov returned to the Soviet Union and made Aelita in 1924, the official framing was triumphant: a science fiction film, a spectacle of communist imagination, a vision of revolution exported to the stars. But the machinery underneath told a different story. The Martian sequences — designed by Alexandra Exter in a Constructivist visual language that remains astonishing a century later — are bracketed by an Earth-bound narrative soaked in mundane anxieties: housing shortages, marital suspicion, economic frustration, the quiet desperation of men who fought for a future and received instead a waiting room. The protagonist Los does not travel to Mars. He dreams it. The revolution on Mars is, structurally, a fantasy sequence inserted inside a story about a man who cannot cope with ordinary Soviet reality. Protazanov had hidden a diagnosis inside a celebration.

This is what the position of outsider-insider produces: not propaganda and not dissidence, but something more troubling — a text that genuinely does not know what it believes. Georg Lukács, writing in his 1920 Theory of the Novel, had already identified the condition of the writer who can no longer naively inhabit the world the dominant ideology claims to have built, who is therefore condemned to represent that world from the inside while remaining structurally exiled from its certainties. Protazanov had not read Lukács, almost certainly. He had simply lived the condition Lukács described — twice, across two collapsed political orders — and the structural ambivalence had entered his filmmaking the way weather enters an old building, through every available crack.

Soviet science fiction as a genre inherited this ambivalence without ever being able to name it. The future, in these films and in the literary production surrounding them — the early work of Alexander Belyaev, the uneasy utopias of Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita novel published in 1923 — is always slightly wrong in ways the text cannot account for. The dreams are too anxious. The machines are too loud. The collective triumph arrives in a register that feels, despite all formal signals to the contrary, like grief. A genre commissioned to make the future feel inevitable kept producing, almost involuntarily, images of people who did not quite believe they would survive long enough to see it.

Mars as Social Mirror: Class, Labor, and the Alien Other

You are handed a telescope and told to look at the stars, but the lens has been ground from the glass of your own window — what you see is always, at some angle, the street below.

This is the structural problem that haunts the Martian imagination of early Soviet cinema, and it is not a failure of vision but a confession of it. When Aelita was released in 1924, its director and his collaborators dressed the alien ruling class of Mars in the geometric severity of constructivist costume while the Martian laborers crouched in poses that any Petrograd factory worker would have recognized in their own body after a twelve-hour shift. The distance of millions of kilometers had been installed not to estrange the audience from the familiar but to make the familiar acceptable to the censor and to the self. Mars was always a mirror held at arm’s length.

Fredric Jameson argued in Archaeologies of the Future, published in 2005, that utopia does not represent a genuine image of the future but functions instead as the political unconscious of the present — a displaced register in which what cannot be directly articulated about existing social relations gets expressed in the language of elsewhere and elsewhen. The Martian aristocracy of Aelita, with its tiered chambers and its absolute command over a subterranean labor force, is not a speculation about what alien civilization might look like; it is a diagram of what Tsarist social organization felt like from below, translated into a vocabulary that had already been made aesthetically revolutionary by Rodchenko and Stepanova. The future is a costume; the body wearing it is the past.

What makes this displacement politically unstable — and therefore historically interesting — is that it cuts in more than one direction. The Soviet state in 1924 was itself in the process of consolidating a new hierarchy under the logic of the New Economic Policy, reintroducing market mechanisms while insisting on the revolutionary purity of its intentions. When Protazanov’s Martian workers rise under the incitement of Aelita’s earthly visitor, the revolution they stage is immediately compromised, revealed as incomplete, absorbed back into a new cycle of domination. This narrative outcome has been read as counter-revolutionary pessimism, but it may be more precisely understood as an involuntary recording of what Soviet subjects already sensed: that the machinery of liberation had begun to generate its own administrators, its own loyalists, its own reasons to wait.

The alien as social other performs a function that the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman traced much later in his work on the production of strangers — the figure who is categorically excluded not because they are genuinely foreign but because their proximity threatens the coherence of the categories by which the community understands itself. The Martians of early Soviet science fiction are not alien because they come from another world; they are alien because they carry, in their exaggerated form, the social logic that the revolution claimed to have abolished. Their strangeness is the strangeness of recognition. The audience laughs, or shudders, or goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with astronomy.

Class on Mars is legible the moment you see it because it has been copied from somewhere. The slave does not look like a creature evolved under a different sun; he looks like someone whose labor has been compounding over generations into a posture, a silence, a particular quality of absence from his own face. And the ruler does not look alien either — she looks like someone who has learned to mistake the architecture of her privilege for the architecture of the world, which is perhaps the oldest human habit there is, and the one least likely to be cured by pointing a rocket at the sky.

The Genre That Was Suppressed Before It Existed

You are sitting in a cinema in Moscow in 1924, watching a rocket tear through painted stars, and you do not yet know that this is the last time you will be permitted to wonder freely about what lies beyond the present tense.

The suppression of Soviet science fiction was not a ban issued on a particular date. It arrived in stages, through the gradual reclassification of speculative thought as ideologically suspect. When the First Congress of Soviet Writers met in 1934 and codified socialist realism as the mandatory aesthetic doctrine, it did not explicitly outlaw the genre. It did something more lethal: it defined legitimate literature as that which depicted reality in its revolutionary development, anchored always to the concrete, the historical, the verifiable. The future was acceptable only insofar as it was a predictable extension of Marxist-Leninist historical law. A future that deviated, that harbored doubt, that contained genuinely unknown variables — that was not speculation. That was sabotage.

The distinction matters because it reveals something about how authoritarian systems relate to time itself. Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, observed that totalitarian movements require the permanent mobilization of their subjects around a single narrative of historical destiny. Speculation is structurally incompatible with this requirement, not because it is pessimistic, but because it is open. A story that asks what might happen if things were otherwise introduces contingency into a system that depends on inevitability. The terror was not that science fiction predicted dystopia. The terror was that it predicted at all, that it suggested the future was a space of genuine uncertainty rather than a confirmed destination.

Alexander Bogdanov had already lived this contradiction before it became policy. His novel Red Star, published in 1908, imagined a Martian socialist civilization with enough internal tension and unresolved social complexity that it could not be recuperated into simple propaganda. By 1928, Bogdanov was dead under circumstances that remain murky, his philosophical work dismissed, his literary imagination rendered invisible. The erasure was not incidental. Bogdanov represented exactly the kind of mind that flourished at the intersection of scientific curiosity and political heterodoxy — a combination that Stalinism could not metabolize.

What replaced speculative fiction was not simply bad literature. It was a different cognitive technology. Socialist realist novels of the 1930s — the Stakhanovite hero novels, the industrial construction epics — performed a future that had already been decided. Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, first published in 1925 and revised repeatedly to meet shifting political requirements, is a document of how a text can be made to evacuate its own uncertainty across successive editions. The revisions were not corrections. They were the systematic removal of everything that made the narrative breathe.

Protazanov’s Aelita, made a decade before the doctrine was formalized, sits now at an angle to all of this — too early to be crushed directly, too speculative to be fully claimed. It is precisely this interstitial position that makes it legible as evidence. The film does not tell us what Soviet science fiction could have become; it shows us the moment before the question was foreclosed, the instant when a popular cinema was still permitted to look upward without knowing what answer was expected. The genre did not fail to develop because it lacked material, intelligence, or ambition. It was stopped at the threshold of its own possibility by a political imagination that had decided, with absolute certainty, that it already knew where history was going — and that any literature which disagreed, even through the innocent medium of imaginary planets and dreaming engineers, was a form of dissent it could not afford to survive.

🎬 Utopia, Revolution, and the Cinematic Imagination

Yakov Protazanov’s pioneering work in Soviet science fiction did not emerge from a vacuum: it was born from a revolutionary cultural moment in which cinema became a laboratory for ideology, form, and the future. To fully understand his contribution, one must explore the wider artistic, political, and cinematic currents that shaped early Soviet culture and the international avant-garde.

Experimental cinema: history and avant-gardes

Experimental cinema has always been the terrain where artists pushed against the limits of representation, narrative, and ideology. From the Soviet montage school to the European avant-gardes, the history of experimental film is inseparable from the political and aesthetic upheavals of the twentieth century. Protazanov’s science fiction work belongs precisely to this tradition of radical formal and thematic experimentation.

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The Weimar republic: art, culture and decadence

The Weimar Republic produced one of the most fertile intersections of art, politics, and cultural anxiety in modern history, directly influencing Soviet cinema through its expressionist aesthetics and dystopian imagination. Films like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari shared with early Soviet science fiction a fascination with technology, mass society, and the fragility of utopia. Understanding Weimar culture is essential to grasping the visual and ideological grammar of Protazanov’s Aelita.

GO TO THE SELECTION: The Weimar republic: art, culture and decadence

Slow and contemplative cinema: the aesthetic of slow cinema

Slow and contemplative cinema represents one of the most significant aesthetic responses to the accelerated rhythms of modernity, offering a counterpoint to the montage-driven energy of early Soviet film. The tension between contemplative duration and revolutionary dynamism runs through the entire history of radical cinema, from Eisenstein to Tarkovsky. Exploring this aesthetic dimension enriches our understanding of how Soviet directors negotiated pace, meaning, and spectator experience.

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Dystopia as a Literary Genre: History and Meaning

Dystopia as a literary and cinematic genre finds one of its earliest and most powerful expressions in the Soviet science fiction of the 1920s, a moment when the future was simultaneously a promise and a threat. Protazanov’s Aelita, with its Martian revolution and its ambiguous critique of bureaucratic power, stands as a founding text of cinematic dystopia. Tracing the history of this genre illuminates how science fiction became a coded language for political imagination and social anxiety.

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Discover the Visionaries of Independent Cinema

These intersecting histories of form, ideology, and imagination are alive in the films curated on Indiecinema, the streaming platform dedicated to independent and auteur cinema. If Protazanov’s pioneering vision has sparked your curiosity, explore our catalog and let the most daring voices in world cinema take you further.

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