Sputnik: Beware of Hitchhikers
Perhaps the most intriguing recent Russian exploration of first contact with an alien species on Earth is also the one that is, at least on the surface, the most derivative: Egor Abramenko's 2020 Sputnik. Technically only a few months newer than Invasion, Sputnik was released into a completely different world. It was supposed to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in...April 2020. Thanks to COVID-19, the producers were obliged to switch to streaming and video on demand, where it was soon watched by over a million Russians and took the fifth slot in the Apple TV rankings.. Sputnik was one of those rare Russian films to gain some popularity in the West, and, given that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was only two years away, it was also one of the last.
Dark and suspenseful, Sputnik combines the extraterrestrial body horror of Alien with the terrifying isolation of The Thing. What saves it from being thoroughly derivative is the transposition of these plots to the Soviet Union in 1983. The film focuses on Konstantin Veshnyakov, the sole survivor of a two-man space mission that crashes in Kazakhstan. Something happened during the flight, but Veshnyakov is uncommunicative, leading his military handlers to call in Tatyana Klimova, a risk-taking psychiatrist whose failed attempts at treating an epileptic teenager by nearly drowning him have left her in disgrace. Colonel Semiradov, in charge of the military facility holding Veshnyakov, reveals to Klimova that every night, while the cosmonaut is sleeping, an alien creature pushes its way out of his mouth. Veshnyakov is apparently unaware of the extraterrestrial passenger who seems to have kept him alive during the crash.
“The Sputnik is growing inside you”—Thanks, Germans, for making this even creepier
This is only the first of many disturbing revelations that the film has for both Klimova and the viewers. It turns out that Semiradov has been feeding the alien live human prisoners every night, and that Veshnyakov is only pretending not to know about his alien passenger. Semiradov wants to keep the experiment going, hoping to discovery military applications for the alien as a weapon. Klimova discovers two important things: the alien has absorbed some of Veshnyakov's feelings and memories (he reacts to a particular song that has important to Veshnyakov), and the reason that the alien picked Veshnyakov over his fellow cosmonaut is that the latter had Addison's disease, which prevented him from producing the cortisol the alien needs for its survival.
Klimova plots her escape with Veshyankov; the plan is for him to inject himself with hormone's that will simulate Addison's, forcing the alien to leave his body. When Semiradov's soldier attack, Veshyankov takes the hormones and releases the alien, resulting in the slaughter of the soldiers. Veshnyakov is now dying without the alien to maintain his body; his last acts are to have the alien kill Semiradov before shooting himself in the head and thereby condemning the alien to death.
What this plot summary fails to account for is the importance of the film's setting. The choice of 1983 is critical: this is just two years before Gorbachev comes to power, meaning that it is the second to last year of unadulterated Soviet power (as [X] points out, placing it in 1984 would have been too "on the nose."). [4]. Thus the time frame not only has the usual advantages of a pre-wireless era, before cell phones made isolating characters more difficult, but, more important, it takes advantage of the isolation and dehumanization characteristic of the Soviet system. Though Sputnik avoids obvious, direct political commentary, Semiradov's casual feeding of human prisoners to his alien captive held in distant isolation seems rather pointed, given the history of the Soviet gulags. Julia Vaingurt sees Semiradov's separation of those who should be protected (good, Soviet citizens) and those who are disposable as an example of the kind of modern biopolitical thinking that the psychiatrist Klimova rejects. Though Klimova's clinical practice could lead to discoveries that might benefit the broader population, her work is retail rather than wholesale: she always sees the individual patient in front of her. This should not be mistaken for sentimentality; after all, her original clinical sin is the near manslaughter of a helpless patient. She can only save one person at a time, but her practice includes the equivalent of waterboarding. Eventually, she comes to realize that Semiradov is, in some way, correct (one person might have to be sacrificed to save the entire population), but that does not mean she is wrong to aspire to an ethics that does not boil down to simple math.
Raising such ethical questions does not require science fiction, but it helps. In this case, the filmmakers choice to focus on the Soviet space program cannot be overestimated. There are, after all, other ways to imagine bringing an alien to Earth (we just talked about several of them). But the space program was a signature accomplishment of the Soviet Union, the country that put the first man (Yuri Gagarin) and the first woman (Valentina Tereshkova) into orbit. It was a source of unadulterated pride, complete with beloved heroes such as Gagarin, a prominent figure in monuments, posters, and postage stamps The space program was proof of the ascendency of Soviet science and, by extension, the Soviet way of life. One of the most famous posters related to the program shows a cosmonaut floating in space, high above a Russian Orthodox cathedral, accompanied by the phrase, "There is no God!" Gagarin himself was inaccurately quoted as telling Khrushchev that he didn't see God in space, resulting in the rhyme, "Gagarin letal, boga ne vidal" (Gagarin flew, but he didn't see God).
Nonetheless, it is easy to see more than just the triumph of atheistic humanism here. Veshnyakov is by no means a straightforward, positive hero. In his zeal to go into space, he has relinquished all responsibility for his seven-year-old son, Alyosha. And by the time the film begins, his role is largely passive, less the cosmonaut-as-hero than the cosmonaut as manipulated victim. Like the protagonsits of Viktor Pelevin's 1992 Omon-Ra, he is a body manipulated by systemic force, or, as the Mercury astronauts put it, "spam in a can." In Pelevin's work, this lack of bodily autonomy is demonstrated through the random amputations inflicted on trainees, as well as the demand that the Omon shoot himself when his simulated mission is completed. In Sputnik, Veshnyakov himself becomes a vessel, or, as Klimova puts it, a "skafandr," the same word that designates the spacesuits cosmonauts wear. In the end, the only way for him to demonstrate heroism is through complete self-abnegation by doing what Omon refuses to do: shooting himself in the head (in order to destroy the alien). Sputnik has come to bury the Soviet space program, not to save it.
Next: More Sputnik: Aliens in the Family