The Andromeda Nebula is an engaging science fiction novel, first published in Spanish in 1965 by the Moscow Foreign Language Editions. It was in many ways a novelty for fans of the genre, who knew the work of a Soviet in a narrative terrain hegemonized in those years by English-speaking writers, such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov or Philip Dick.
Remembering today about the war in Ukraine the novel by the Russian-Soviet biologist, philosopher and writer Ivan Efremov (1908-1972) is more than a literary exercise, because The Andromeda Nebula it was perhaps the boldest of communist utopias, a prefiguration of a brave new world impossible to glimpse on the current international stage.
Efremov finished writing this work in 1952 and it was published in 1957, under the process of de-Stalinization commanded by Nikita Khrushov, because the book pointed out “errors” committed in the construction of socialism that could be interpreted as a criticism of Iosif Stalin.
Set in the futuristic Era of the Great Circle, in a galactic civilization that would come after several millennia, the novel makes in some passages a retrospective from our Age of the disunited world, characterized by “the gloomy centuries of capitalism”, which led to the century of the split, where the “old capitalist states” faced “the new socialist states”, so that the latter would finally triumph and give way to the Age of world unification.
Since Karl Marx proclaimed “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” in 1848, as the culmination of the Communist Manifesto, for Marxists world unification would be combined in the key of an internationalism governed by class identities and not by nationalities, religions, ethnicities or borders. It is worth remembering that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was named precisely because of the soviets, assemblies of workers, peasants and soldiers.
The internationalist vocation generated some heroic pages in history, but it did not persist as a hallmark of the promise of a world united around socialism. On the contrary, in the Cold War it became a bad argument in support of military interventions in Eastern Europe, as an area of influence of the USSR.
An August 1968 joke. In the midst of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, a fervent crowd surrounds a Soviet tank in Prague. The hatch opens and the tanker who launches this proclamation appears: Proletarians of all countries, unite… or shot!!
More than one old professor of Marxist theory taught critically in those years that the deformations of “real socialism” had their origin in the predominance of state interests over class interests. The repressive and bureaucratic subjugation that Stalinism exerted on the various peoples that made up the USSR persisted throughout the Cold War and explains the rapid fragmentation of both the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The supposed brotherhood in socialism was so fragile, so precarious that internationalism imposed from above, that not only the dismemberment occurred., but also the new governments of Eastern Europe, as well as some former Soviet republics, rushed to embrace capitalism and ask for its accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with the approval of the United States.
The Era of world unification, dreamed of in Efremov’s utopia, seemed more within reach from “the old capitalist states”, although soon it would be shown that Washington’s unipolar hegemony was far from guaranteeing a world without wars, but, on the contrary, old and new conflicts would intensify. The fight against terrorism after September 11 produced more victims than terrorism itself and fueled religious and nationalist fundamentalisms with its dramatic aftermath of mass migrations. The “pax americana”, like its ancestral predecessor, the “pax romana”, defended the center of the empire by subduing the periphery.
Our Era of the disunited world was once again tinged with warmongering from Afghanistan to the Gulf and sub-Saharan Africa, with the artificial imposition of “Arab Springs” in Egypt and Libya that led to dictatorships or failed states, to land in Syria, where geopolitical balances drove the involvement of Russia, Iran and Turkey, in addition to the United States, giving notice of the return of the Cold War.
All of that seemed to matter little until the invasion of Ukraine. The United Nations and NATO itself ignored with a criminal indifference the combined aggression of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against Yemen, which in seven years has left 377,000 dead, 70% children under the age of five. It is that the disunited world unites in trade and does not admit concern for human rights either in Africa, Latin America or China.
Also the bloody normalization of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially in the former Yugoslavia soon lost relevance. The accumulated tensions looked sideways until Russia wanted to put a belated brake on NATO’s expansion on its borders and Vladimir Putin pointed the darts at Kiev. The civilized West discovered with ill-disguised surprise that the Cold War was not dead, although it was no longer possible to dress it up as an ideological confrontation between capitalism and socialism.
For the supporters of the anti-imperialist discourse that reigned on the left in the second half of the twentieth century, it was gratifying that Moscow regained prominence, countering Washington in Syria. In the same way, the disappointment that has meant the government of Joe Biden, which far from correcting the intemperances of Donald Trump, tried to overcome it with arrogant speeches in the face of China and Russia itself, would justify a certain adherence to Putin.
However, it is incomprehensible that sectors of the Marxist left intend to vindicate the current Russian president after the invasion of Ukraine as a symbol of a reborn anti-imperialism. Putin is a conservative nationalist, manager in Russia of a neoliberal system in the economic with a political regime that appeals to the depths of the “Russian soul” to impose from the polls an autocracy with features of totalitarianism.
Perhaps in that the former KGB agent can assimilate himself to Stalin, but in no way to the Bolshevik revolutionaries who in 1917 wanted to sow the seed of what several decades later Ivan Efremov characterized in his utopia as “the new socialist states”.
There is a battery of questionable arguments in favor of the Kremlin-ordered invasion, from historical antecedents that refer to tsarism, to the “denazification” of Ukraine. But substantively the only reason that can be addressed is the response to NATO’s expansive efforts, against a backdrop in which the irreconcilable belligerence between Moscow and Kiev is ultimately another heartbreaking demonstration that the internationalism that guided the creation of the USSR was incapable of clearing the prototypical nationalisms of this Age from the disunited world.
The utopia of The Andromeda Nebula it is no longer an idealized bet that was projected into the future, but a naïve reverie for the moment salvageable only as a curious piece in science fiction literature.
The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
