That's fascinating that there's so little utopian fiction produced in the early decades of one of the most self-consciously utopian political projects in history. If nothing else, I would have thought the Stalin era would have seen someone trying to defend what was happening as historically necessary and inevitable (as H. G. Wells more or less did in The Shape of Things to Come).
You can regard all "realistic" fiction written in the Stalinist era as utopias. Stalinism abolished history: people of that period were supposed to feel that they are already living in the future. Utopias and SF started blooming in the USSR when the gap between the present and the future opened up again, during the "thaw". But that was the beginning of the end of the USSR because people realized that the communist utopia would never come.
That's fascinating that there's so little utopian fiction produced in the early decades of one of the most self-consciously utopian political projects in history. If nothing else, I would have thought the Stalin era would have seen someone trying to defend what was happening as historically necessary and inevitable (as H. G. Wells more or less did in The Shape of Things to Come).
You can regard all "realistic" fiction written in the Stalinist era as utopias. Stalinism abolished history: people of that period were supposed to feel that they are already living in the future. Utopias and SF started blooming in the USSR when the gap between the present and the future opened up again, during the "thaw". But that was the beginning of the end of the USSR because people realized that the communist utopia would never come.