The Strugatsky brothers’ Soviet sci-fi classic ‘Hard to Be a God’ took aim at dictatorship. Russia’s new state-backed TV adaptation strips away the politics.

The streaming platform Wink is releasing a series called “Hard to Be a God,” based on the novel by the Strugatsky brothers. The creators have noticeably changed the book’s plot: now we follow Earth’s envoy, Don Rumata, from his very first days working in Arkanar. There are more characters and more adventures, but the most important thing has vanished: a coherent vision of a utopian future and the theme of science as the driving force of progress. Where Aleksei German argued with the Strugatskys’ novel in his famous film, the series’ creators simply prefer to ignore the inconvenient parts. Critic Anton Khitrov writes about the project.

The Internet Development Institute (IRI) funding an adaptation of Hard to Be a God is even funnier than Apple producing the anti-capitalist series Severance.

The Strugatskys’ now-classic novel was published in 1964, near the end of the Thaw, when the central subject in Soviet art — even permitted art — was the experience of living under dictatorship. Like other artists of their generation, the Strugatskys attacked totalitarianism from a leftist perspective: they “fought Stalin with Lenin’s help,” as Veniamin Smekhov, an actor at the Taganka Theater and another emblematic figure of Thaw-era culture, once put it.

Hard to Be a God, like other works in the Noon Universe cycle, is set in a future where communism has triumphed on Earth but has yet to be established on other inhabited planets. To gently nudge them in the right direction, Earth sends “observers”: historian-scientists who gather data about distant worlds and, where possible, support local progressive forces.

The novel’s protagonist, the observer Anton, works undercover in the feudal city-state of Arkanar under the pseudonym Don Rumata Estorsky. His main mission is to save the philosophers, scientists, and poets targeted by the all-powerful Don Reba, the closest adviser to Arkanar’s king. The parallels with the Great Terror are obvious, though Rumata himself — a product of Soviet literature, after all — draws a different historical parallel: German National Socialism.

Boris Strugatsky insisted that Hard to Be a God was political commentary, not just adventure science fiction. But on today’s Russian streaming platforms, political commentary is unthinkable, unless you count propaganda like the Z-themed melodrama Landyshi “Lilies of the Valley,” which airs on the same Wink platform as the Strugatsky adaptation and, naturally, is also backed by the IRI. Although a few lines of dialogue can, if you look for it, be read as timid dissent, the new adaptation is on the whole deeply apolitical: it has more characters and storylines but incomparably fewer difficult questions.

In the series’ opening scenes, an unnamed character played by Leonid Yarmolnik — an observer — is killed by an Arkanar arrow. “If only you knew who they replaced you with,” whispers his comrade Don Kondor (Sergei Bezrukov), who has just been assigned the newcomer Rumata (Serbian actor Aleksandar Radojičić) as his charge. The joke: in the full-length film adaptation of the same novel — Aleksei German’s famous farewell picture, shot from 1999 until his death in 2013 — Rumata was played by none other than Yarmolnik.

If this is meant as a claim to continuity, it’s unconvincing. German’s Hard to Be a God is a three-hour black-and-white film — slow, bleak, and utterly uncompromising. The Wink series is high-budget entertainment complete with spaceships, cool gadgets, and armored war horses. In the Strugatskys’ novel, the Earthling characters were, naturally, scientists (the favorite profession of 1960s writers); in the adaptation, they’re more like superagents, characters out of a spy thriller — security forces, in a word, not unlike Don Reba’s gray guardsmen, only good.

The textbook-masculine Radojičić is convincing with a sword and unbearably phony whenever the script requires him to say something smart. The protagonist is arguably the series’ weakest point: these days, a virtuous, square-jawed strongman doesn’t even cut it as the simplest action hero — something more complex is required. It’s no accident that the new Superman looks less like a demigod and more like an awkward intern.

Rumata busies himself with anything — court intrigues, rescuing pretty girls, fleeing from bandits — anything but his direct duties: helping the persecuted intellectuals, whom the series remembers only for the sake of appearances. Even the hero’s main motivation — finding the missing Doctor Budach — has nothing to do with his mission in Arkanar. In the book, Budach was a native of Arkanar, a scientific luminary who needed the Earthlings’ protection. In the series, Budach is an observer, Rumata’s father, and saving him isn’t about a better future but simply filial love. It’s a noble cause, certainly, but no longer selfless help for a gifted alien.

Far more interesting is Fyodor Lavrov’s Don Reba. The minister of the royal guard isn’t just insinuating, cunning, and cruel — he’s a fervent believer, convinced that his destiny is to become second only to God. A security officer who has seized power and has a messiah complex is the most topical figure in the whole show. This would work if the rest of the series weren’t so toothless.

Hard to Be a God showrunner Andrei Zolotarev has adapted Soviet science fiction before: he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Sto Let Tomu Vpered “One Hundred Years Ahead,” based on the novel by Kir Bulychev. Both projects ignore ideology: Zolotarev carefully avoids not only the word “communism” but any details about the social system of the future.

This isn’t a polemic with the source material — it’s an attempt to avoid dangerous territory, nothing more. The 22nd century in the series is clearly meant to be utopian, but the project carefully avoids saying what that utopia actually consists of, since imagining an ideal future in today’s Russia is apparently a hopeless task. The creators take refuge in clichés: biotech and minimalism, white suits and white uniforms. Instead of Zoom, there are holograms like in Star Wars; instead of pets, Boston Dynamics robot dogs (vintage items, in the series’ universe).

Every so often, though, we get hints about how things are going on Earth: some of the station’s staff are American, but the working language is Russian, and the equipment here and there bears the logo of Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation Rosatom. “In the 21st century, we were saved by pure chance,” Don Kondor, Rumata’s morally flexible mentor, remarks in the first episode. It’s unclear from the dialogue exactly what danger was avoided, but judging by the international space mission under Rosatom’s patronage, the Russian Federation apparently ended up as the world’s hegemon. Behold the happy future, according to the IRI.

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Meanwhile, communism in the Strugatskys’ work isn’t just a nod to mandatory ideology. The entire novel grows out of the conviction that humanity is, in principle, capable of building an ideal society — and building it by relying on universal laws of science: social, economic, historical, and so on.

That’s exactly why the Earthlings fuss over Arkanar’s scientists: they know for certain that sooner or later, these scientists will inevitably come up with not just the internal combustion engine but Marxism too. However bleak the novel’s resolution may be, the Strugatskys ultimately offer hope: no despotic power can wipe out science, progress is unstoppable, and it brings people happiness.

Actually, Hard to Be a God is ideal material for an adaptation: smart prose that practically begs to be argued with. More than 60 years after the novel’s publication, we’ve had plenty of reasons to conclude (or at least entertain the possibility) that intellectuals and autocrats sometimes form a fine symbiosis, that progress isn’t always a good thing, and that history doesn’t move in a single direction.

What’s more, a polemical take on this story already exists: German’s film. Yarmolnik’s Rumata was noticeably older and more cynical than the character in the book. Neither he nor the other observers still held out hope for change in Arkanar; they worked mostly out of inertia, rapidly degrading to the level of the locals — even raising their children according to Arkanar customs. In German’s version, progress capitulates to the onslaught of archaism, ideals fade, and the characters turn into villains without the slightest anguish.

Far from all Strugatsky fans embraced the film adaptation, probably because the director made no effort whatsoever to be engaging — an undeniable virtue of the original. If anything, he deliberately “drowned” the plot in repellent details of Arkanar daily life. Not every viewer will agree with the film’s misanthropy either, but whether or not you like German’s interpretation, it at the very least complicates our understanding of the novel rather than simplifying it.

This, ideally, is exactly what an interpreter should be doing: if a film adaptation doesn’t convince you that you were missing something important about the source material, it’s unclear why the adaptation was needed at all. You could also make Hamlet into a political thriller about medieval Denmark, or War and Peace into a patriotic blockbuster about defeating Napoleon, and there would surely be viewers satisfied with such a reading. But wouldn’t it be more honest just to do without the classics here?

The difference between the full-length adaptation and the series is especially clear in how each handles the same Strugatsky idea: Rumata’s hidden camera. In the novel, the observers wear special headbands so they can supply their fellow Earthlings with documentary material day and night. In German’s film, Rumata is a human movie camera, the viewer’s avatar in Arkanar: we follow him through narrow streets, breathe in sweat, and trudge through mud — in short, we’re immersed in real, unappealing life. The series’ Rumata, who wears high-tech contact lenses instead of a headband, is more like a first-person-shooter character: when we’re shown the world through his eyes, health indicators glow at the edge of the frame.

The Arkanar of the new adaptation really is a virtual reality with little connection to ours. An otherworldly sky with a giant planet, plasticky CGI architecture, immaculate costumes fresh from the wardrobe department, tedious battle scenes set to generic action music — everything suggests we’re not watching a Strugatsky adaptation but a Twitch stream.

Even so, all these complaints are aimed at the wrong target. It seems the creators’ real creative ambition wasn’t a dialogue with the Strugatskys but the notorious policy of import substitution. It’s telling that Fyodor Bondarchuk is involved: not only did he produce the series, he also played one of Arkanar’s courtiers. His last directing work in feature film was the two-part Prityazhenie “Attraction” and Vtorzhenie “Invasion,” a dubious attempt to play on Steven Spielberg’s turf and make a Hollywood-style blockbuster about contact with aliens. This same “import-substitution” logic is obvious in the Wink series too, which is straining hard to become a homegrown Game of Thrones made from homegrown material: violence, sex, and court intrigue, but without magic and, for some reason, without politics.