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The long-lasting Russian Civil War between Red and White Armies ended in 1924, resulting in one of the most interesting entities in the history – the USSR. Vladimir Illych Lenin died in the same year. Soviet cinemagoers, by that time already used to the avant-garde tendencies of young filmmakers, were nevertheless surprised when they first saw Yakov Protazanov's film Aelita. Partly taking place on Mars, designed in Constructivist style, the film became so popular that many newly born Russian girls were named Aelita. This socially committed film takes place – rather surprisingly in the context of the Soviet propaganda of the time – outside the Communist world and outside the whole world. It anticipated a series of science-fiction films that would be made under the heavy burden of the Iron Curtain in the decades to come. Just like its genre twin- the so called eastern – the SF from the Eastern Bloc will offer the world cinema an undisguised ideological utopian pattern which not until today could we identify as a dystopia. And while modern Fascism, that destroys individuals, can be easily identified in, say, Western-made 2001: A Space Odyssey, the eastern colleagues did not have such an easy job dealing with ideology of the future. Films based on literature and on the ideas from the turn of the century perfectly reflected not only the fear of future, but also of technical progress that could lead to moral and ideological deviations. After all, who has ever heard of comradely self-criticism in space?!
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