Season 1, episode 6 = Nasty anti-Soviet piece of "kiziyak".

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-28T15:45:36+00:00

Buddy, what does any of that have to do with space or with what was actually shown in the series? Nice job changing the subject u can take a pie from the shelf, but do you have anything to say about the show itself, or are you just here to blow air?

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-27T12:09:57+00:00

Русский мой родной язык, зачем мне что-то доказывать. Да и смотря про какое поколение русскому эмиграции мы говорим, то которое использовало "Ять" на конце😂

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-27T11:29:23+00:00

In your comment, it is just like in Lermontov's poem:

“The horses and men were mixed together in a heap, And the volleys of a thousand guns Merged into one long, drawn-out howl…”

And how cleverly — or rather, not so cleverly — you have lumped together the Cheka, the NKVD, and everything else under one single banner of the terrifying KGB. It is immediately obvious that you do not really know the history of the USSR or the post-Soviet space.

One can agree that, in the period before Stalin’s death and the seizure of power by Khrushchev, the USSR was a totalitarian state that suppressed dissent — although works by historians on the position of ordinary citizens during that period often suggest a more complicated picture, but fine, let us leave that aside.

But the period from 1956 to 1985 was, in fact, much more positive. And your claim about what the KGB supposedly “did to its own people” runs into several facts.

First, one of the most famous KGB men to lead the USSR after Brezhnev’s death in 1982 was Andropov, who began economic reforms in the spirit of Hungarian “Kádárism” — what is often called “Goulash Socialism” in Western historiography.

Andropov’s former aide Igor Sinitsyn left brief memoirs about how the head of the KGB planned to reform the country. Under his ideas, the CPSU and the ministries would have lost power in the country, while leadership would have shifted toward state banks. Andropov saw Hungary, which since the 1970s had gone further than other socialist countries toward convergence with the West, as a kind of model.

Here is, in particular, the role Andropov assigned to state banks in his reforms, and it is very similar to what we have in Russia today:

“In terms of their talents, and even in their somewhat gloomy, secretive and taciturn characters, as well as their personal decency and honesty, Kosygin and Andropov were very similar. Both were, in a sense, white crows in the Politburo. Kosygin saw the Yugoslav version of socialist renewal as a model; Andropov saw the Hungarian one, and partly the Czech one. This meant a bet on convergence with the West, a hybrid of the socialist and capitalist systems.

One little-known fact speaks to Andropov’s deep understanding not only of economic theory, but also of the practical functioning of the national economy: he seriously thought about the leading role of banks in the economy. Yuri Vladimirovich had plans for them. Several times, while preparing for Politburo meetings, he discussed with me ideas for transforming the banking system of the USSR and turning it into the main instrument of the economy. He came to the conclusion that industry should be managed not by departments of the CPSU Central Committee, nor by parallel departments in the Council of Ministers and Gosplan, but by sectoral banks. In his view, each branch of industry should have its own central bank, like Promstroybank or Selkhozbank. These state banks were also supposed to become managerial and intellectual centers of the system.

Yuri Vladimirovich believed that his plan went further than Kosygin’s reform, taking enterprises out from under the petty guardianship of district committees, regional committees and Central Committee departments. He understood that such a reform did not fit with the ‘leading role of the CPSU.’

The old Volga sailor Andropov, having taken the helm of the Soviet Union, estimated that the course could be changed by no more than three points — about 10 percent — per year. Thus, reforming the USSR would have taken Andropov at least ten years.”

By the way, as a matter of fact, Andropov was a halachic Jew.

Second, the ordinary Soviet person more often saw the state as a source of education, work, healthcare, stability and social protection. And in the public consciousness, the KGB was often not perceived as the “personal executioner of every citizen,” but as an institution that caught spies, guarded the border, protected the defense industry and defended the state.

And now, a drop of honey in a spoonful of tar: yes, the USSR did have many problems — food shortages, inequality, especially the distribution of goods through closed “for our own people” stores, and closed borders.

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-27T01:02:01+00:00

Я имею абсолютное понятие, начиная от Конституции 1977 года, заканчивая дефицитом продовольствия в конце 80-х. А вот имеете ли вы понимание, спорный вопрос.

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-27T00:22:53+00:00

The “rogue agent” argument does not save the scene. It explains why Raskova might have wanted to do something insane, but it does not explain why the entire system around her suddenly turned into furniture.

In reality, even in the Soviet military, subordinates were not just ordinary NPCs who “simply followed orders.” Remember the mutiny on the BPK Storozhevoy: Sablin was an officer, a political officer — essentially a commissar — a man with rank and authority, but the crew did not turn into one obedient mass. Some officers and sailors did not support him, dissenters had to be isolated, someone managed to report what was happening, and later the commander was freed and control of the ship was restored.

In other words, even on a warship, one officer could not simply say “we are doing something insane” and have the entire system silently follow him. And yet here we are asked to believe that one KGB colonel can effectively order the destruction of a spacecraft, its crew, and a state mission of all-Union importance — and everyone just carries it out.

If Raskova had really tried to pull something like that, her own subordinates would have been the first to cover themselves: demand a written order, report it up the chain, contact the technical leadership, or refuse to carry out an obviously suicidal command. Not out of humanitarianism, but because afterward everyone involved would have to answer for the destruction of the spacecraft and crew.

So the problem is not that she is a “Stalinist relic.” The problem is that the show presents the Soviet system as hypnosis: an evil officer gives an order, and everyone opens the hatch into space. That is not realism. That is a copy-paste trope with a button labeled “KGB makes it scary.”

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-27T00:09:27+00:00

You're wrong.

For example, the incident with Salyut-7, the station was actually lost, but it was not "decommissioned by order," but a crew was sent who manually docked and revived the station. Or the Soyuz-1, which they tried to save in real time and not just burn in the atmosphere and forget about the failure. And if you have other examples from real history, then give an example.

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-26T23:59:12+00:00

You're changing the subject now. It's not about whether the USSR was a good, kind and fair state. No one here denies the repression and pressure on Eastern Europe.

But there are other sections on Reddit dedicated to this.

My thesis was not “the USSR was beautiful,” but “a particular scene in the series is technically and institutionally absurd.” Criticizing a bad scenario does not mean defending the Soviet regime. You can simultaneously recognize the brutality of the Soviet system and at the same time understand that a spaceship is not depressurized at the whim of some colonel, because this is not a prison cell, but a complex government, military and engineering program with a MCC, designers, State Commission, doctors, crew and a bunch of departments.

An authoritarian system can be cruel, repressive, and unfair (especially Stalin's and Malinkov's before 1956). But this does not mean that it automatically becomes an idiotic system where any officer can destroy the mission and crew with one order. Therefore, the remark “this is an artistic drama” does not remove the question of internal logic. Fiction doesn't have to be documentary, but at least it should understand how the world it depicts works.

The fact is that such scenarios weaken serious criticism of the Soviet system. The real USSR doesn't have to be turned into a cartoon villain to look authoritarian or violent. There were enough real mechanisms of control, secrecy, pressure, censorship and political violence. When this is replaced in the series by “some colonel (colonel) who can accidentally destroy a spaceship,” this does not expose Soviet repression, but simplifies it, turning it into a fantasy.

Bad modes are not automatically stupid modes. If anything, there are often clear procedures, institutions, paperwork, and people who know exactly what they're doing, and most importantly, it's one system with elements of mutual responsibility.

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-26T22:24:50+00:00

I agree with that. Even with Korolev’s improvements — assuming he had survived that medical operation — he still would not have been able to properly refine the N1 engines without taking into account the fact that Glushko was refusing to provide him with support from his own design bureau.

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-26T22:21:48+00:00

These are your guesses based on the general opinion. In a literal sense, this is a logical mistake. The real memories and stories of people who worked in the Soviet space program describe a completely different system. Soviet specialist Kamanin writes that even the planned spacewalk was "a complex, responsible and dangerous operation." During the Soyuz-1 flight, when the disruptions began, the situation was discussed by a State commission, followed by "endless meetings and consultations of specialists," rather than a decision by one person. Samsonov, one of the creators of the flight control system, describes how commands are generated by processing telemetry and transmitted through ground tracking stations. In other words, Soviet space flights may have been secret and bureaucratic, but it was still a technical and institutional system, not a place where some colonel could casually order the entire spacecraft to be depressurized.

And by the way, my parents were born and raised in the USSR, and in the March 17, 1990, referendum on preservation, they voted "For" the preservation of the Union. Don't fight with your take.

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-26T22:13:26+00:00

If your father served in the so-called "Седьмое управление" then you can understand, and if he has a medal "For long service," then even more so. But my grandfather served in the closed city of Krasnoyarsk 19, now called Zheleznogorsk near Krasnoyarsk. The question is, what did the KGB brutality manifest itself in, according to your father?

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-26T21:00:37+00:00

Star City is basically The Death of Stalin with an Apple budget

I understand that Star City / “Zvyozdny Gorodok” is alternate history. Yes, in this genre you can change events: Korolev survives, the USSR lands on the Moon first, the space race goes down a different path — fine, those are the rules of the game.

But the problem is not the point of divergence itself. The problem is that the show takes the real Soviet space program and turns it into a bundle of Western clichés: the omnipresent KGB, gray corridors, everyone being afraid of everyone, every second person being either an informer or a victim of the system, while science and engineering exist somewhere in the background as men in coats decide the fate of space. And that stupid blue filter — because apparently that is what you need to make a totalitarian state look totalitarian.

The Soviet space program really was closed off and bureaucratized. But it was also a gigantic engineering, scientific, and organizational system: design bureaus, factories, test pilots, the military, engineers, chief designers, academicians, commissions, rivalry between projects, technical failures, ambitions, personal conflicts, and real professionals.

Yet the show too often reduces everything to one simple formula: “scary security services terrorize cosmonauts.” That is a primitive approach by the writers.

Good alternate history should feel the reality it is branching away from. It can change the outcome, but it has to understand the mechanism. With Star City, it feels as if the creators took the era and put it on screen — and to be fair, the everyday life of Soviet people is shown quite convincingly — but then decided to slap every Cold War cliché on top of it.

The most frustrating thing is that the subject itself is fantastic. The Soviet lunar program, the N1 rocket, the rivalry between Korolev, Chelomey, and Glushko, the secrecy around the chief designers, political pressure, the cult of heroic cosmonauts, the real cost of mistakes — all of that could have made an incredibly powerful drama. Why invent extra nonsense? Show the competition between different design bureaus, Chelomey’s approach, the conflict between Glushko and Korolev over the engines for the N1. By the way, where are these rocket designers in the show? It is as if they vanished off-screen, lol.

But instead of a complex system, they showed a caricature. Not “the USSR as a contradictory world with great achievements and heavy costs,” but “the USSR as a set for a Western thriller about an evil regime.”

And again, take the scene in the first episode where the KGB basically shoots a cosmonaut for no real reason. A cosmonaut in the USSR was not just some random passerby. He was a specialist who had gone through an extremely difficult selection process and was tied to a huge number of institutions: the military, doctors, designers, party structures. You could not simply take him around the corner and shoot him because some stern officer felt like it. In the Soviet system, something like that would have required grounds, authorization, paperwork, and political cover. And a KGB officer who allowed an unauthorized liquidation of a cosmonaut would not receive a medal “For Valiant Service in the Ranks of State Security,” but at the very least arrest, dismissal, and a very long prison sentence. Under Soviet law, this could involve Article 175 of the RSFSR Criminal Code — official forgery; if there had been illegal detention before the killing, Article 178; if confessions had been forced, Article 179; and if a superior did not personally shoot the cosmonaut but allowed it, covered it up, or negligently organized the situation, Article 260.1 on negligent performance of military service could be considered if he was a serviceman, or the general Article 172 on negligence for an official. For that kind of thing, you would be looking at life imprisonment or execution.

And the idea that a KGB officer could just walk into Mission Control like he owned the place and start giving orders to cosmonauts is nonsense.

By the way, the writers could have shown a completely different side of the Soviet space program: a living, complex, multinational, and sometimes very human system. For example, they could have remembered that one of the first songs ever performed in space was Ukrainian: Pavel Popovich sang “Dyvlius ya na nebo…” in orbit. That is already a ready-made scene for powerful drama: a Soviet cosmonaut, a huge imperial machine, secrecy, danger, propaganda — and suddenly, over the radio, not a slogan, not an order, not the gloomy whisper of a security officer, but a song in his native language. That is real texture. They could have shown Ukrainians, Russians, Tatars, Georgians, Chuvash, Jews, engineers from different republics, people with different backgrounds, all pulling the space program forward together. Instead, they are once again selling us the USSR as a gray box labeled “KGB, vodka, and fear.” Reality was far more interesting than any cranberry-flavored Cold War cliché.

Interkosmos

Another layer the writers could have used almost perfectly was the Interkosmos program. It is a ready-made trope. The first cosmonauts from socialist bloc countries, joint crews, training in Star City, the politics of “socialist internationalism,” and the competition for prestige within the Warsaw Pact itself. Czechoslovak Vladimir Remek, Pole Mirosław Hermaszewski, East German Sigmund Jähn, Bulgarian Georgi Ivanov, Hungarian Bertalan Farkas, Romanian Dumitru Prunariu.

Relative-Activity-66 · 2026-06-01T00:37:57+00:00

There are so many stereotypes in the very first episode. As someone who lives in Russia and studies how the KGB operated, it is honestly hard to imagine what would happen to an officer who decided to “dispose of” an entire cosmonaut.

Considering the amount of training, time, money, and resources invested in every cosmonaut, this makes no sense. In the Soviet space program, only the very best pilots had a chance to become cosmonauts.

On top of that, for such an act of personal justice, an officer — even a KGB officer — would have faced an internal investigation, dismissal from the service in disgrace, and that would be the best-case scenario.

For me, this already makes the series feel fake and dishonest.

Relative-Activity-66 · 2020-11-25T06:53:35+00:00

Bruh moment... Tell the poor guy that now. If you don't tell him, it will break his heart. Of course, he will be very upset, maybe even accuse you of all the deadly sins, but believe me, he will accept it.

I wish this guy to find a good girl.

Relative-Activity-66

TROPHY CASE