The Ukrainian rebel who started as a sci-fi writer
Fedor Berezin doesn’t look like a warlord. He seems out of place among the beefy, thuggish rebels of eastern Ukraine, but he’s their second-in-command.
“He really does look like the stereotypical sci-fi nerd. He’s this guy in glasses and he’s very soft spoken,” says Russian-born commentater Cathy Young. “Berezin is a sci-fi writer. So we have this really fascinating phenomenon of a sci-fi writer playing real war games.”
What makes Berezin’s presence among the violent, pro-Russian separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine even more extraordinary is that he wrote about the conflict four or five years before it happened. And apart from the plasma guns , the exoskeleton suits and the mechanized monsters, Berezin’s lurid sci-fi version of the war has proved prophetic.
“He wrote about eastern Ukraine becoming a battleground between East and West in a way that is eerily similar to what’s going on today,” says Young, who was the first western-based writer to spot a curious literary trend.
Over the past decade there has been a string of Russian and Ukrainian futuristic thrillers harping on a similar theme: noble Russians staunchly resisting the evil encroachment of the West.
Some pro-western Ukrainian politicians have even argued that the Kremlin may be behind this literary outpouring, encouraging a flood of books that make the idea of a war against western Ukraine acceptable.
Sounds far fetched? Oxford University lecturer James Sherr – one of the UK’s leading authorities on Ukraine – says there could be something in this claim.
“This about getting your people and others to adopt a certain narrative. The Russians are past masters at it.” says Sherr. “What people of Putin’s background – security and intelligence – understand is that to achieve your aims in war or peace, you have link all the different dimensions of activity into one narrative.”
Western science fiction buffs are not entirely surprised either, at both the alleged use of sci- fi as a political tool and at the genre’s predictive power. Author and critic Graham Sleight points out that in the past, sci-fi has foreshadowed a number of military innovations and developments.
“In 1903, HG Wells published a story called ‘The Land Ironclads’, which anticipated the armoured tanks first used in WW1 a decade or more later,” says Sleight. “And one of the founding fathers of American science fiction, Robert Heinlein, wrote a couple of stories in 1940, not only anticipating a world with nuclear weapons but also a nuclear arms race.”
And we would perhaps be wise to note: Berezin has also written a series of novels in which the United States and Russia go to war…. over possession of the Moon.
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