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The Great Politics Mess Up
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The Presence was absent way too long. Quasar #46. Earl Bassett: So how you and Heather doing? Burt Gummer: Well, she's.. still visiting her sister. You know, she actually blames our problems on the collapse of the Soviet Union! Earl Bassett: Well, you did take that kinda hard, Burt... — Tremors 2
The end of the Cold War caught almost everyone by surprise.
Prior to World War II, it was common to hear people claiming that the Soviet Union was about to fall in a matter of years or even months. Not only did those predictions fail to come true, but the USSR even managed to survive a massive invasion by Those Wacky Nazis, win the war against seemingly impossible odds, and extend its influence over a country or ten. The people who predicted its imminent demise felt rather silly, and the opposite mood began to set in, with everyone assuming that the Soviet Union would last forever (or at least long into the forseeable future). It was thus assumed that the end of the USSR could only come as part of the general End Of Everything — most likely as a result of nuclear war. The (relatively) peaceful collapse that actually took place was very much unexpected.
Ergo, it is rather funny to hear references to the Soviet Union, the Cold War, East/West Berlin and East/West Germany in Sci Fi shows written before 1989 but set Twenty Minutes Into The Future.
Compare Science Marches On. See also I Want My Jet Pack. The Other Wiki also has some background.
This trope can also apply to any other unexpected historical twist:
- No one expected The British Empire or other European empires to fall.
- No one expected the advent of colonial independence.
- No one expected the communists to take power in Russia in the first place.
- Even the Kaiser's Germany, which just helped send them in hoping to stir up a little chaos.
- No one in The Fifties expected the events of The Sixties
- No one really expected apartheid to end peacefully
- More recently, no one expected the 9/11 attacks (though some did expect an attack similar in nature in other parts of the world).
- No one expected the New York Giants to upset the previously-undefeated juggernaut New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.
- No one expected Fermat's Last Theorem to be solved.
- No one has a blind clue what's going to happen during the next decade or two. Seriously, we're flying blind here.
A lot of fiction written shortly before such unexpected events and set Twenty Minutes Into The Future can seem ridiculous in hindsight — but usually it's not the author's fault, really.
Contrast Why We're Bummed Communism Fell.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- An episode of the original Bubblegum Crisis revolved around a stolen super weapon that a minor villain had been going to sell to the East Germans.
- Gundam 00 has a brief mention of the IRA declaring a ceasefire in the far future (after 2300). This already happened in real life, in 2005, 2 years before Gundam 00 was even announced.
- The organisation that declared a ceasefire was the "Real IRA", presumably some sort of spiritual successor, although there was a real "Real IRA".
- Same with the Sri Lankan Civil War. In the series, Celestial Being did an intervention to stop the war... which basically just ended in 2009.
- Gunbuster, made in 1988 but set in 2023, had Jung Freud one of the Soviet Union's ace pilots. Presumably she was from East Germany.
- In the Ghost In The Shell manga, the Soviet Union is still going in 2030.
- The story of SPT Layzner features students from both sides of the Iron Curtain traveling to the moon together on the equivelent of a field trip. At least it actually predicts that the conflict between both sides will end, just much slower than it actually did. Also, the potential end of this Cold War is the stated reason that the aliens show up in the first place, to take over the world before the two sides work together well enough to take over their planet, which they have no idea exists in the first f-ing place. Better Than It Sounds, though.
- Transformers Masterforce refers to Ginrai traveling in West Germany; Masterforce was made in 1989 but set some time after 2011.
- Patlabor, created in the late 80s but taking place in the late 90s has this. The Brocken military mech that shows up to cause trouble for the Mobile Police in every continuity was said to have been commisioned by West Germany's border patrol & the OAV episode featuring it has it "accidentally" falling into the hands of Communist sympathizers as part of some kind of ill-conceived War For Fun And Profit scheme by the manufacturer. A memorable episode of the TV series involved a Soviet defector bringing an experimental mech to a Japanese seaside resort town where everybody was actually a spy of some sort. The second movie mentions the end of the cold war, but it's uncertain if this is a Ret Con or if it happened sometime between 1998 & 2002 in the movie-verse.
- Angel Cop suffers from this as it takes place under the belief that the Japanese economy would continue to grow, instead the economic bubble popped in the mid 90's.
- Go Lion started with Earth being destroyed in World War III, when the east and west finally launched their missiles at each other in 1999.
- 009-1 the anime takes place in an alternate world where the Cold War continues... because the original manga was made in the 1960's and used the Cold War.
Comic Books
- In the comic Camelot 3000 King Arthur and Merlin are resurrected and their knights reincarnated in the year 3000. Almost nothing has changed politically since the 1970s or early 80s, except that there are now four power blocs. The USA has a president who dresses as a cowboy and carries sixguns. The USSR is led by Comrade Yazof, a Breshnev lookalike, China is led by Chairperson Feng (a lady Mao), and Africa by The Supreme Rakma, an Idi Amin type. Apartheid also still exists, and Gawain is reincarnated as a black South African.
- And that's is after a nuclear war that blasted man back to the medieval period.
- The Marvel Comics group called the Soviet Super-Soldiers is an unusual example because stories set in the present were affected. This happened because Comic Book Time slowly pushes forward the date of any present-day stories. Several years after the breakup of the USSR the group not only wasn't Soviet, but none of its previous adventures were either. This resulted in an embarrassing time period when it was carefully left unnamed every time it was used, until Marvel finally settled on "Winter Guard" as the name it always had.
- American Flagg dances on the verge, but still manages to fall into this pit, though it falls very gracefully. The sight of ultra-capitalist Soviets and "Stalinland" theme parks in the late 21st century (in a mid-to-late 80s comic which ended just as the Berlin Wall fell) seems almost like a foreshadowing.
- In early Judge Dredd comics, the Soviet Union is depicted as surviving into the 22nd century, having been renamed as the 'Sov Blok', and is depicted as the main villain in the Apocalpyse War storyline. In later comics, it enters a Glasnost period, before reverting back to its previous militaristic self.
- To be fair both sides are using The Judge System, The Sov Block has not been Communist for a long time.
- In IDW's Transformers: Escalation, much of the plot during the second half or so consist of the Decepticons trying to stir up conflict between the Soviet Union and a breakaway republic called Brasnya. This was written in 2006. Explanations, please.
- They started referring to Russia instead of the Soviet Union later on, mind you.
Film
- The plot of 2010: The Year We Make Contact revolves around the Cold War. Although not the book's, which is why a few lines about peace are tacked on to the message at the end of the film.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey also had the Soviet Union around, obviously. Plus a USA-USSR pact opposing China, which is the opposite of what happened in real life, but was plausible in the 1960s when written due to border clashes between China and Russia.
- The book 2061 not only has the Soviet Union still around, it has South African apartheid continue until the 2030s, when it is destroyed by a violent revolution that scatters the Afrikaners across the Earth and Solar System. They more or less become the new Jews.
- The 2001 series had a sort-of double mess-up. In the first book (and movie), though the USSR is still around, it and the US are cooperating and have friendly relations (as shown by Floyd chatting casually with Soviet citizens, who are also clearly friends, on the space station. They even inform each other that they're always welcome to come by to visit whenever they just happen to be in each other's countries). When Clarke wrote 2010 (in 1982) it was obvious the real-world US and USSR were not quite being so friendly, so he decided that there should be conflict between the Soviet and American astronauts because of their respective countries' rivalry (though not as blatant as in the film, where the two countries are at the brink of war). Of course, fast forward to the real year 2001, where Soviet Union is gone, the US is supreme, and where, in fact, Russia and the US are building a joint space station, though not one as big and fancy as the one in the book.
- Spoofed in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. The title character, after being frozen in 1967 and unfrozen in 1997, at first believes that the Cold War is still ongoing, and when he is told that it ended, he initially assumes that the Communists won.
Basil Exposition: Austin, the Cold War is over! The Russians are our friends now! Austin Powers: Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh comrades? Eh? Basil Exposition: Austin... we won. (Pause) Austin Powers: Oh, smashing, groovy, yay capitalism!
- Ditto in the surprisingly entertaining Brendan Fraser film Blast From the Past. After emerging from their fallout shelter after three or so decades, the father (Christopher Walken) refuses to believe that the Soviet Union collapsed without a fight.
- Robocop, set at some unclear future date after 1987, implies that the Cold War is still going on, with references to SDI and the MX missile. The latter, which became the Peacekeeper, has now been scrapped.
- While Skynet was ultimately responsible for the Nuclear Apocalypse in the Terminator series, the plots of the first two movies (especially the first) implied that Skynet was built in response to the Soviet threat, and that it caused Judgement Day (in 1997 according to T2) by deliberately triggering "Mutually Assured Destruction" between the USA and USSR.
- To be fair, though, when the Terminator in T2 is explaining things and Russia's attack, John asks, "Aren't they our friends now?" so the makers were of course well aware of the fall of the Soviet Union.
Literature
- In the prototypical Cyber Punk novel Neuromancer, the Soviet Union is still alive and kicking; in fact, it's the United States that's fallen apart.
- Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series portrays the Soviet Union as an intercontinental power well into the 22nd century. This is something of a subversion, however, as in the beginning of the series Earth has a single unified government; by the second book, that government has collapsed and older political bodies have risen and reasserted themselves (note that the later books are widely considered to bite the big one).
- Tom Clancy's The Sum Of All Fears is a close one — written in early 1991, months before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and revolves around a "hoaxed" Soviet attack on the US in January 1992, by which time the USSR had been formally dissolved for a month.
- His portrayal of the Afghanistani mujahideen in Cardinal of the Kremlin also uses the "tragic, noble victims of the invading Soviets" cliche common in those times.
- Historical developments sure have a wry sense of humour!
- Well, Tom Clancy is himself a castaway left behind by The Great Politics Mess Up. He has not written anything good since then.
- It doesn't help when you consider that his earliest books were written Twenty Minutes In The Future. After that, the gaps in book released were greater than the book's timeline advancement, until (from our perspective) books that had taken place 2-3 years in the future were now occuring over five years in the past. His latest novel took place with a Time Skip of around ten years to bring it mostly into the present, but also came with a bunch of changes that brought brought the book's state of affairs in line with the real world...at the expense of wiping out everything his series had done and changed in the past twenty years.
- In the novelization of the film Fantastic Voyage, there are two superpowers referred to simply as "Us" and "Them".
- While not a Sci Fi novel, the Dale Brown novel Sky Masters was published in 1991 and set in 1994. It makes references to the Soviet Union (which would cease to exist at the end of 1991) and features the Strategic Air Command in a prominent role. The SAC would be abolished in 1992.
- A major plot point of Eon, the Greg Bear novel written in 1985 and set in the early 21st century, is that the USSR still exists and the Third World War breaks out between it and the USA. Other other hand the plot makes extensive use of the concept of parallel worlds and alternate histories, which handwaves the problem away: The story is not taking place in our timeline.
- The Pliocene Saga by Julian May takes place both in the 21st century and in the Pliocene. The Soviet Union plays a prominent, but peaceful role in psychic research. The author has had to dodge the Soviet issue in the sequels.
- The Third Millenium, a book of future history by David Langford and Brian Stableford, written in 1985, has communism (and capitalism) collapsing in the mid 21st century, but the USSR existing as a political entity right up until 3000.
- Jerry Pournelle's Co Dominium is a world government evolving out of cooperation between the US and USSR in 1990s. When the real 1991 came around, Pournelle retconned the timeline so the Co Dominium was founded in 2000. Not to mention also adding a Soviet coup to reestablish the USSR 20 minutes into the future, which had collapsed in reality.
- There may be an element of Truth in Television here, believe it or not. A former official of the Ford Administration says that during the Ford years, the USSR had dropped hints to the USA about an unofficial alliance, dividing the world into spheres of control and reinforcing each other in power over their respective unofficial empires. The spooky part is that he actually called it a proposed 'codominion' a word not that far from 'Co Dominium'.
- Though The Mote In Gods Eye (set in the Co Dominium's far future) manages to avoid this. A Russian-settled planet St. Ekaterina has a warship called the Lenin; it's implied that all of Russian culture and history (including the Communist era) is swallowed up in vague, general Russian patriotism. (The irony of Russian Orthodox icons on a warship called Lenin is specifically commented on.) Orson Scott Card does a similar thing in Xenocide, where a far-future Taoist scholar refers to Mao as "the first Communist Emperor".
- The Eclipse trilogy by John Shirley happens in an early 21st century with a Third World War between NATO and Warsaw Pact. It was retconned later to a revived Soviet Union.
- Enders Game, which was first published in 1985, was released in a new edition in 1991 so that references to Russia would reflect the decline of the Soviet Union.
- The Third World War: August 1985, a 1978 mock-history book on a World War Three (So Yeah), has the USSR collapse in 1985... In a highly violent manner after the nuclear destruction of Minsk, now Belarus, and Birmingham, UK.
- Jack Chalker's original Well World novels from the 1970s featured Com Worlds, generally horrific dystopian planets descended from Soviet Russia. When the universe was rebooted, human history was altered slightly... resulting in the world as we know it, and the presumption that Com Worlds will not be a big part of the new future. (Rebooting the universe allows you to Ret Con everything, it seems)
- In the Isaac Asimov short story Let's Get Together, NATO and the Warsaw Pact are at peace, and get called us and them, we and they, etc. The USSR isn't even red on maps any more, it's a soft pink to make it look less threatening.
- And NATO countries were pale pastel green. The idea was that both societies had slowly drifted towards the middle, starting to resemble one another more and more.
- The Zone World War III novels by James Rouch (written in the 1980s, though an actual year is never mentioned) are now referred to as Alternate History for this reason.
- James Blish's Cities in Flight series involves the Western democratic government model becoming ever more intolerant, eventually resembling the Soviet model very closely, and then the Soviets winning the war (and absorbing the West) because they were better at being Soviets.
- Mack Maloney's Wingman series, first published in 1984, had World War III take place in the 80s, and in the 90s, some time after the real-life collapse, the Soviet Union (which somehow still exists despite being bombed into oblivion in the war) uses a traitorous Vice President to let them bomb and take over the United States.
- A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason (copyright 1991) not only has the Soviet Union survive, it has communism as the dominant political system of Earth at the time of the First Interstellar Expedition (on which the main characters traveled).
- Joe Haldeman's book Worlds, written in 1981, is set in roughly 2085, with a significant population living on satellite semi-independant "worlds" in space, but makes note that on Earth, most of Asia is now part of the "Supreme Socialist Union."
- John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar actually handles this pretty well, despite being written in 1968. The USSR isn't gone in 2010, but it's mostly defunct and implied to be Communist only in name, and the real threat is ... China. A lot of other predictions in the book are surprisingly accurate as well.
- The first Honor Harrington book may have come out in 1992, but author David Weber clearly felt it was perfectly legitimate to have a Soviet expy as the antagonist nation. The second book in 1993 was even more explicit about this, a large part of it being a clear analogy to proxy wars in the Middle East, but Weber did deign to name a major star after Boris Yeltsin. Then, the third book (1994) abruptly introduces a Rob Pierre and a Commodore Danton participating in a mass oath of rebellion in a tennis court, simultaneously deciding that a) the Cold War was over and b) the series should get closer to its Horatio Hornblower roots.
Live Action TV
- A poster in Red Dwarf features a rather prominent Soviet flag.
- Star Trek The Original Series makes occasional mention of the Soviet Union when relating "history" from the 21st century, and occasionally refers to names which have changed; for example, in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, during a global loss of power, Leningrad's power grid is described to have collapsed. Leningrad has reverted to its pre-revolutionary name, St. Petersburg.
- It should be noted, for further confusion but possible justification, that while the city has been renamed to "St. Petersburg", the district has retained the name "Leningrad".
- On the other hand, the famously Russian character Chekov always expresses pride in being Russian, and never mentions the Soviet Union.
- Chekov's historical knowledge is highly questionable, given his tendency to attribute various inventions and historical events to Russia that had nothing to do with the place - a character tic and a reference to Soviet Union's real life tendency to inflate its achievements at the time. Later mocked by the famous joke about watching Hamlet "in the original Klingon". Chekov is just a very weird character who indicates how awkward the writers felt about writing a patriotic Russian at the height of the Cold War — the most bizarre moment is when he declares himself "the Czar of all Russia", which would seem to at least indicate that he's not a communist partisan.
- The second episode of TNG featured the SS Tsiolkovsky whose dedication plaque reveals that it was built and launched in the USSR in 2363.
- Nobody expected Praxis to blow up, or that it would lead to peace similar to that shared between the real world's superpowers.
- Played with in a Time Travel episode of Voyager. (The one with the federation ship from the 29th century that crash lands in 1996 Earth...yeah, they did time travel a lot.) In talking with a native, Paris had a basic understanding of the time period and culture, and tried a cover story that the people firing energy weapons were covert Soviet operatives. When she says that the Soviet Union has been gone for years, Paris nervously glances at Tuvok, then covers for himself by saying "Yeah, that's what they want you to think."
- While not being explicit about it, the Doctor Who story "Warriors of the Deep" (set circa 2084) involves two superpowers armed with nuclear weapons that highly mistrust each other. The Doctor even comments that nothing has changed: "There are still two power blocs, fingers poised to annihilate each other." To make things vaguer, Ingrid Pitt's character has an Eastern European accent (she was born in Poland).
- The Novelization doesn't even have the half-assed aversion; the blocs are named as East and West, and the seabase residents (the "good guys") are from the West Bloc, while the East Bloc has a policy of "uniformity, obedience and central control". It was not adapted by the original writer, and shoots any subtlety in the original setup stone dead.
- Several UNIT stories, including earlier ones and the later story "Battlefield", also mention the "end of the Cold War" but still have a USSR. This combines The Great Politics Mess Up with the UNIT dating mess-up, since UNIT stories were notoriously vague and contradictory as to whether they were Twenty Minutes Into The Future or The Present Day.
- This actually has some basis in an oft-forgotten fact. The Cold War ended in 1989 but the Soviet Union persisted until the end of 1991. There was a brief period when it was assumed that the West and the USSR would remain on good terms from then on, the USSR's collapse came as something of a surprise (and was largely accelerated by the failed hardline coup against Gorbachev in August of '91) even though in hindsight it seems to have come so quickly after the collapse of the Eastern European satellite-regimes and the end of the Cold War that it's easy to assume that the two happened at the same time.
- The made-for-TV movie Amerika posits a U.S. that was taken over by the Soviet Union and was now Soviet-occupied territory. The reason given in the movie as to why this happens is "American apathy."
- To contrast, there is also a novel entitled USSA: United Soviet States of America, which is a murder mystery set in American-occupied Russia.
- Stephen Colbert insists the Cold War is still going on, and has periodic Cold War Updates whenever anything newsworthy happens in Russia.
Video Games
- The various installments of Street Fighter II (from the original to Super Turbo, and even later home versions) continued to name Zangief's nationality as "USSR" well into the mid-'90s, and even offered an ending sequence wherein a fictionalization of Mikhail Gorbachev is helicoptered in to congratulate him on his victory. It isn't until Street Fighter IV that his nationality is officially changed to Russia.
- Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, first released for the MSX2 in 1990, not only predicts that the Soviet Union will still be around in 1999, it also features a character named Natasha Marcova (Gustava Heffner in the rereleases) who works for the StB (the Czechoslovakian Secret Police), a real-life organization that was dissolved during the very same year the game was released.
- The original Strider assumes that the Soviet Union will still be around by the year 2048. In fact, the first stage is set in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, a former Soviet state now known as Kazakhstan.
Tabletop Games
- The second edition of the Cyber Punk game (Cyberpunk 2020) was published in 1990. The fall of the Soviet Union is mentioned in the timeline (as is Germany's reunification), but it was eventually replaced by the Neo-Soviet Union by 2020. Apparently the game's writers didn't really know how to handle a collapsed USSR. Justified, in that a) in 1990, no one really knew what would happen to the USSR, and b) by the mid-1990s, many former Soviet Bloc nations were having troubles with capitalism and democracy and Communist political parties were enjoying much grassroots support.
- The first edition of Shadowrun had references to the Soviet Union in its future history, while the second swapped these out for the Russian Federation. Later editions said to hell with it and admitted the game's timeline is an Alternate History.
- Given that it is now 2009 and the US government is not currently pushing Native Americans off their land so that extraterritorial corporations can suck the reservation resources dry, such an admission was pretty much inevitable. We should probably still be wary of that VITAS plague that's supposed to hit us next year, though.
- This hit the game Twilight: 2000 particularly hard, as the premise of the game was that it was set during or just after World War Three, after the Soviets had rolled over the Fulda Gap... in the year 2000. They tried a Ret Con that only ended up torking off the Germans (predicating the war on Germany's invading Poland...) before reverting to the original plot, throwing up their hands and declaring it an Alternate Timeline.
- Most of the relevant parts of the Battle Tech timeline are in the middle parts of the 31st century, so it's a petty detail — but the game's timeline includes a second "Soviet Civil War" in the early 21st century, just before the first manned flight to Mars. Newer materials haven't retconned this; presumably, it's just assumed to be an alternate reality.
- Actually similar to Shadowrun (only logical since both were created by the same company), it was at one point mentioned that an attempted retcon to the Russian Federation was made, before the creators gave up and as much as declared (Particularly joked on on the Battletech forums) that Battletech is not our future but rather the future of the mid 1980s. Which actually explains quite a bit, including the bulk of much of the computer equipment in the game in comparison to modern computers and the like.
Western Animation
- The Soviet Union somehow exists in the third season of Transformers: G1, produced in 1986 and set in 2006. Fanon has concluded that it was re-established at some point in that universe... although a simpler assumption would probably be that it never collapsed in the first place.
- Linka from Captain Planet: In the original intro, Linka was from the Soviet Union, but between seasons the line was changed to Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. So it's not inaccurate, it just makes catching the old intro hilarious.
- Or even catching the first episode, where she angrily answers Wheeler's "Hey, love your accent, babe. You Russian?" with "Soviet. Please, go away."
- In the You Tube comments, JayZer0 makes the awesome proposal of making the whole team like this:
From the Belgian Congo, Kwame with the power of earth.
From New Amsterdam, Wheeler with the power of fire.
From the Tang Dynasty, Gi with the power of water.
And from the Confederation of the Equator, Ma-Ti with the power of heart!
- Star Cops includes a recurring character who is generally referred to as Russian, but clearly has the Soviet flag on his uniform. The premise seems such that the major Cold War tensions have eased and the two superpowers have learned to get along...more or less. Sort of like the way it is now between the US and Russia.
- The animated series Spiral Zone, produced in 1987 but set in 2007, assumes that the Soviet Union still exists in the early 21st century.
Advertising
- British insurance company Norwich Union released an advert in 1989 which suggested the barriers between East and West might soon come down. When they did, they released a second advert, taking credit for their prescience.
Theatre
- The musical Chess was originally released as a Concept Album in 1984, at the height of the Reagan-era Cold War tensions. Set in the "current day", the plot relied heavily on those tensions. By the time it reached Broadway in 1988, glasnost was in full swing and the impending fall of the Soviet Union was already visible on the horizon. As a result, vast swathes of the story — and several of the songs — had to be rewritten to accommodate the new political reality. (For instance: in one of the dropped songs, the civil servants of the Russian embassy complained that so many Russians defecting to the West "makes you wonder what they built the Berlin wall for"; in a newly written song, a CIA agent and a KGB agent agree to cooperate to the point where "the Berlin wall becomes a backyard fence.") Modern revivals of the show seem to be getting round this by more-or-less sticking to the plot of the album, and simply making the whole thing an early-80s period piece.
Real Life
- A Small Town In Germany, of course. Only a slight majority of the Bundestag voted affirmitive to moving herself and the government from Bonn to Berlin after reunification. Germany became so used to its provisionals some time after the war.
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