‘Star City’ Depicts the Space Race as Run by the Evil Empire

One of the sleeper hits for Apple TV has been For All Mankind, a surprisingly grounded piece of alt history speculation. Its premise: what if, instead of beating the Soviet Union, America loses the race to the moon and a furious Richard Nixon gives NASA everything it needs to win the next races? With the magic of timeskips, each of the subsequent four seasons sees a massive escalation in technology. Now, with Star City debuting immediately following the fifth season of For All Mankind, Apple is taking the opportunity to milk the concept from the other side of the Cold War. Taking its name from the military compound from where the Soviet Union directs space missions, Star City shows what was going on in the first season of For All Mankind but from the Soviet perspective.

Star City has all the best parts of For All Mankind — namely the nerdy obsession with the science of the 60s/70s era space programs. The fictional universe diverges from ours when the Soviet designer Sergei Korolev (Rhys Ifans) does not die in 1966 and, under the sustained leadership of the man who sent Yuri Gagarin to space, the Soviet Union was also able to beat the United States to the moon. Star City accurately depicts alternate scientific methods that the Soviets were exploring but eventually gave up, mostly because their funding dried up. Star City even goes so far as to take the relatively obscure historical story of the Venera program and blow it up into Korolev’s personal passion project, for which he is willing to defy the Soviet state apparatus in order to send a secret manned mission to Venus.

After Americans beat them to the moon, the real world Soviet Union was perfectly happy to go down the Venus rabbit hole in spite of their comparatively dwindling budget. So, why would even a fictional Korolev, fresh from the triumph of landing a man and a woman on the moon, have to keep a manned mission to Venus secret? The answer to this is that, despite nominally coming from the For All Mankind franchise, the more obvious spiritual influence on Star City is Chernobyl, which as part of its depiction of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, presented stereotypically brutal Soviet administrators whose obsession with the rules only served to inhibit the scientists who actually knew how to solve problems. Much like Chernobyl, the ideology underlying the depiction of Soviet era politics in Star City is unobjectionable if you’re someone from the West who’s been taught from birth that the Soviet Union was a horrible place where people only ever did anything because they were threatened to at gunpoint. But Star City escalates even beyond Chernobyl in its philosophy of inherent Soviet cruelty.

The avatar of this cruelty is the KGB Agent Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) who, like everyone else in Star City, speaks in a vaguely sinister British accent. As the KGB agent tasked with security at Star City, Lyudmilla takes every possible opportunity to harass Korolev and let him know who’s really in charge. Not that she’s especially good at her job, given that not only does an actual spy manage to sneak into Star City, Korolev somehow manages to get all his bulky Venus mission gear inside without her noticing.

Lyudmilla, with her cavalier attitude to torture and murder, is always made the villain. Even when the American intelligence operation is explained, the program portrays it surprisingly sympathetically. America is only surveying, not sabotaging, the Soviet space program. Also, the Soviet Union’s draconian ban on foreign music is apparently the only reason why the operation succeeds at all, since anyone caught listening to it is sent to the gulags. Bear in mind that Lyudmilla can apparently send anyone she wants to the gulags. The only way to get around her is by pretending to do your job. The most prominent storyline outside of the space stuff is about how Lyudmilla inspires rookie wiretap operator Irina (Agnes O’ Casey) to defy protocol and warn people being wiretapped. It’s a moral red line that feels quaint in the post-Edward Snowden era.

Despite shrouding the entire story in doom and gloom, Star City explicitly tells us from the start that the Soviets are winning. They got to the moon first! It completely beggars belief that they could have accomplished such a thing dealing with this level of general dysfunction. Yes, it makes sense that Korolev is only ever called “Chief Designer” as the Soviets were concerned during his lifetime that the United States might try to assassinate him. And yes, Soviet overlords may indeed have cruelly decided that Gagarin was too important as a publicity symbol to risk sending back into space. But, while I don’t pretend to be an expert on the history of Soviet space programs, I am extremely skeptical that morale at the program was ever at such a low point that people were openly talking about how Gagarin was murdered for political reasons.

The emphasis on personal, rather than collective accomplishment makes a bit more sense if you’ve seen For All Mankind, where the personal desire of characters to physically go into space themselves often trumps any other considerations. Which is ironic given the titular ethos of the species collective.  The implication of For All Mankind is that if the space race had continued it would have benefited all mankind. We would now have a base on Mars, serious space tourism, an optimistic vision for the future, all sorts of wonderful things like that.

The moral of For All Mankind is that the Soviets beating America makes Richard Nixon’s focus outward on science rather than downward on military domination. Now, though, Star City shows us an alt history where, despite accidentally encouraging the United States to do good things, the Soviet Union was still every bit as evil as the most polemic Cold War propaganda would have us believe. It’s a strangely counterintuitive message to suggest that while the power of science can melt even Richard Nixon’s heart, it could only inspire Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union to become still eviller.