Authors

Mikhail Suslov¹;  ¹ The University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Discussion

This paper analyzes the coalescence of the pro-Kremlin think-tanks and the professional science fiction community in post-Soviet Russia. It homes in on the work of political experts under the aegis of the Presidential Administration and shows that many of them considered works of political fiction as a tool for “programming” people’s cognition through games. The paper argues that the cognitive turn in official Soviet philosophy (part of which was the (in)famous circle of “methodologists”, headed by Georgy Shchedrovitsky, as well as Aleksandr Zinov’ev’s “sociological novels”) sensitized post-Soviet ideologists to the problem of modelling the future by means of literary fiction, while the popular demand for imperial and geopolitical compensatory fantasies created a nutritious soil for the emergence of the sub-genre of “future war fiction”.