Prisoners of Power - Comments On Inhabited Island

Comments On Inhabited Island

Inhabited Island seems to portray an evil fascist society and a capitalist enemy of socialism. Yet in fact it is a thinly veiled satire of the Soviet regime itself.A suffocating, blunt inescapable propaganda, militarism, invention of external enemies to justify internal repression, disconnect between official statements and real life, the rule by faceless cliques of party bureaucrats who did not believe the official ideology themselves, prison camps to keep the malcontent and the rebellious, using penal battalions as shock troops, dreary life in polluted cities and faceless apartment blocks; all these elements of the novel were instantly recognizable by the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Control Center becomes a prophetic metaphor, where the end of Soviet propaganda spells the collapse of the regime itself. The parallels were apparent to the Soviet censors. The publication was allowed but a large number of cosmetic changes was required. The censors attempted to make the setting feel less identifiably Soviet. The modern military ranks (lieutenant, major) were replaced with archaic or made up ones (brigadier). The "Unknown Fathers" were changed to "All-Powerful Creators". The government posts became identifiably German (Chancellor, Baron). The internal security troops were renamed from "Guard" (which was similar to the name of the elite units of the Soviet army) to the decidedly non-Russian "Legion". The people from Earth: Maxim Rostislavsky and Pavel Grigorievitch became Maxim Kammerer and Rudolf Sikorski. In the initial 1969 publication in Neva magazine the names are the original Maxim Rostislavsky and Pavel Grigorievitch. In the editions of the novel after Perestroika many of these redactions were undone. However, a few remained. For example, Maxim Kammerer already figured in several other novels of this cycle.