Film
Science Fiction Has Always Been About Revolution
Aelita, a 1920s Russian Silent Film about Soviet Utopias, Free Speech, and Sex Queens from Mars
Not to be dramatic, but I would build a spaceship and fly to Mars and start a proletariat revolution for Aelita Queen of Mars. If you haven’t seen this silent film that is considered the first Russian sci-fi film, you’re missing out on an absolutely bananas mashup of romance, Russian civil war history, and of course, sexy space queens from Mars.
But let me step back a moment because this film requires a lot of context to talk about. When I first saw it, I was immediately reminded of the recent discourse regarding science fiction’s so-called “social justice warriors” and the case against politics in books. There’s a common argument among the American right that politics don’t have a place in science fiction — which should just be fun space lasers, pew pew pew.
“Authors can either cheerlead for left-wing causes, or they can keep their mouth shut. Open disagreement is not tolerated and will result in being sabotaged and slandered. Message or identity politics has become far more important than entertainment or quality,” says Larry Correia, who was embroiled in 2014 in the Hugos controversy (original quote from Correia’s blog, more on his views at USA Today, for a full run-down of the events of that year, check out this great article at Lit Reactor.)
Anywho, the movie Aelita: Queen of Mars is deeply “political.” Set in 1921 and based on a 1923 novella by Aleksey N. Tolstoy, cousin of War and Peace author Leo Tolstoy, the film follows Los — an engineer who fantasizes about going to Mars after receiving a mysterious message on the radio.
Los and his wife are members of the working class in Russia living through the Russian Civil War and Bolshevik revolution. In 1917, Lenin was established as the leader of Russia in the October Revolution as leftist revolutionaries overthrew the provisional government, ending the Romanov dynasty.
In a series of events following, the Bolsheviks introduced food rationing and Lenin made farms and factories collectives, as well as outlawing the church. There was an economic collapse, famine, and five million people died. This all occurred in 1918–1921. Ultimately, Lenin prevailed, only to be replaced by Stalin. By 1929, Stalin deported 15 million peasants to Artic reasons, a huge portion of whom died.
Aelita is a movie that takes place at the intersection of the 1920s Russian space craze and the uprisings of revolutionaries. In 1903, Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky first determined that it was possible to send a rocket to space when he came up with the mathematical formula for the escape velocity from Earth (European Space Agency). His drawing for the first spaceship resembles the spaceship in Aelita.
The fans of space travel at the time were amateur scientists with little formal education who embraced pop culture at the time. Space exploration became a part of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) plan with a desire to find a more utopian society, which makes sense if you consider that at this point in time, society was undergoing extreme changes. For a brief moment, the NEP represented a utopian dream, one that combined a free market and capitalism after the Russian Civil War and the nationalization of industry. This period was short-lived, as Stalin came to power, the NEP was removed in 1928 in favor of the Great Bank.
“Notwithstanding harsh conditions in the cities, the urban population continued to grow through the 1920s due to peasant migration into the cities and massive demobilization following the end of the civil war. Despite one million unemployed in 1924, wages finally began to rise the same year, and the standard of living for the average factory worker — someone like the tireless space crusader Fridrikh Tsander — began to improve noticeably. With urban renewal accelerating and the first fruits of the revolution appearing, people conjured up old dreams of utopia in new and experimental ways.” — Asif A. Siddiqi (Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia, Osiris, 2008)
Science and technology were seen as a way to aspire to this utopian dream. In Aelita, Los’ wife Natasha works at an evacuation center. The film intercuts dreamily bizarre scenes of Mars with real-life footage of starving refugees on trains and orphans tied in high chairs. This juxtaposition of footage conveys the message that space travel is a solution to — and escape from— social ills. This “fantasy of liberation” as Asif A. Siddiqi refers to it in the above-quoted article, shows that science fiction has always been about escaping the dominant paradigm in an oppressive society.
The result is a kind of alternate reality utopia that, in Aelita, takes place in the scenes on Mars. Los is a kind of Dorothy in Oz character. He imagines Aelita as this perfect Queen sex symbol who needs his help to overt row the repressive “elders” who refuse to let her communicate with Earth. When Aelita sees Los through a device meant to show her earth, she falls in love with Los. She is in direct contrast to Los’ plain, working-class wife Natasha. In this way, Los desires to be a member of a higher class of elite royalty — or rather, to remake the world through his fantasies.
Los becomes jealous when Natasha gets involved with a scheme to steal sugar with their tenant, a member of the NEP, and when she starts becoming involved in the parties that deeply contrast the poverty at the time. Los ends up killing Natasha and escaping on a rocket to Mars, where he helps the slave class of Mars overthrow the elders. An impassioned speech promotes the revolution that overthrew the House of Romanov and established the Soviet Union:
“The free speech of free men has beat the Elders thousand years of hypnosis.”
Of course, Aelita ultimately betrays Los and sides with the elders — because she is a symbol of the elite. At the last moment, Aelita is transformed into Los’ wife Natasha, right before he pushes her to her death once more.
The next cut scene reveals that the original message from the beginning of the movie is actually a publicity stunt. Los, like Dorothy returning from Oz, awakens and realizes it was all a dream. Nathasha is safe and Los vows to stay and fight for a better world.
When it came out, the film was widely popular but panned by critics for years to come for not being Soviet enough. The film was marketed by adverts put in the newspaper that mimicked the message from the film. They even released leaflets from planes that contained the mysterious message. Ars Cinema, where the movie premiered, was decorated with giant figures of Aelita and art deco Martian decor.
Aelita is ultimately a pro-Soviet film, but at the time, its utopian leanings represented a hope for a different future, one that would not come to bear.
Aelita is an example of a film that expresses the complex political and social mores of its time. While Los ends up rejecting Aelita and the elite, backstabbing, ruling class she represents, the film's controversial representation of the gray area of a revolution seems subversive when viewed some 97 years later. I found myself rooting for Aelita, the lonely space queen who just wants a good snogging.
Los buries his dreams of traveling to Mars — but not because those utopian ideals are bad, per se, but because he wants to build that ideal here on Earth. Without words, Aelita shows how the political-cultural moment of a time will always make its way into representations of that time, even when the goal is short-lived.
I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Aelita: Queen of Mars at Fantastic Fest 2021, where the film got a new score. In partnership with GroundUp Music, Fantastic Fest and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema partnered to introduce a new score by Chris Bullock. Bullock is a member of the band Snarky Puppy.
Chris Bullock brings a beautiful quality to the music added to the film which elevates and entrances. Mixing synth and organic qualities, the music is simply magical. You can watch an excerpt below. I am really hoping that this version of the film gets a wider distribution at some point in the future.
This film is reviewed as part of Interstellar Flight Press’ coverage of the Alamo Drafthouse Fantastic Fest 2021. We thank Alamo Drafthouse for providing a free screening of this film.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
