series about superheroes in Leningrad in the 1930s-1940s

Kinopoisk is releasing the series “The Others,” a domestic retro analogue of “X-Men,” where both the NKVD and the Ahnenerbe are hunting for superheroes.

Text: Stanislav F. Rostotsky

The morning paints the walls of the Winter Palace and other Leningrad sights with a gentle light, and a white zeppelin like a whale hangs in the skies above them. “The Krauts were scattered here!” – a random passer-by comments on the phenomenon of the flying Moby Dick. “It would be better if they gave us one like this, friends and comrades…”

Since the case obviously takes place at the turn of the 1930s–1940s, and everything that happens from the first frames has a discreet but clear touch of a kind of proletarian steampunk, it is not difficult to guess that we are talking about a somewhat alternative reality, slightly noticeably twisted in the spirit of something else. Bradbury, or Philip K. Dick. However, anyone who was once impressed by the striking opening credits in One of Us (1970) by Gennady Poloka – “On April 20, 1941, German diplomats toured the sights of the Kremlin” – will also understand the German airship over Leningrad. And at that very moment it turns out that the Krauts flew over the city over the free Neva not without reason. Something unprecedented comes into their field of vision: in the very center of the city, saving her brother from death in a road accident, factory girl Anna Smolina (Irina Martynenko, subtly similar either to Stephen King’s Carrie in Sissy Spacek’s version, or to Alice from the Soviet cartoon about the Country miracles), unleashing an unknown force, with tragic consequences, scatters Leningrad public transport in different directions. And while the young NKVD officer Likholetov (Ilya Malanin), who is investigating the incident, is forced, contrary to the facts, to adhere to the traditional version of sabotage at that time and cling to the thesis “there is no place for devilry in the Soviet Union,” Anna ends up in a closed “sanatorium” at an even more closed institute under the leadership of Professor Ilyinsky (Alexey Serebryakov), who is engaged in all kinds of “devilishness”. When the report about a mysterious road accident from heavenly spies reaches its destination, from “friends and comrades” to Ilyinsky with an offer that cannot be refused, Herr Neumann (Wolfgang Czerny) arrives – a considerable rank from the bad memory of the Ahnenerbe organization, not only wonderful aware of the existence of “others” like Anna, but also possessing all the makings of a superman.

The superhero adventure was married to the realities of World War II even before that war ended. First of all, in comics and cartoons: almost all existing characters from the Marvel and DC universes at that time, not to mention Disney, fought the Nazis. On our side of the state border, quite outstanding works in this genre also appeared. The main treasure among them, without a doubt, was and remains the story “Night Eagle” by Alexander Lomme, which acquired cult status back in the second half of the 1960s, when it was published for several years in “Pionerskaya Pravda”, and since then has stood for one and a half years. ten reissues. And several generations of readers dreamed about the film adaptation of this amazing story about the pilot Ivan Kozhin, shot down over occupied Czechoslovakia, who gained the ability to levitate and began to defeat the Nazis from the air under the pseudonym Night Eagle, which awes his enemies.

However, the roots of the origin of the “Others” are hardly worth looking for in the well-read volumes of the “Library of Military Adventures”. The creators of “The Others” were inspired by much more familiar and obvious examples, namely, the corresponding retro episodes of “Hellboy”, “Captain America” and, first of all, “X-Men”, with which the new Russian series has much more in common than the theory of the wandering plot and universal image. All this has been seen and heard, if not literally (although there is no shortage of direct quotes and references), then at the level of feelings and the most general ideas about how a plot of this kind should develop; arithmetic average calculated on a Felix adding machine. In one of the episodes, Neumann explains to General Canaris (Denis Burgazliev) that for the chess game he started between the NKVD and the Ahnenerbe, he has “a queen before whom all the kings of Europe will bow.” It is not difficult to guess who is meant by this queen, or, to put it in amateurish terms, “queen”. And although so far the game has hardly advanced beyond the classic beginning e2-e4, over time it has very definite chances of developing into a genuine grandmaster battle. In the end, even the real X-Men, before becoming Marvel’s celestials, spent more than one five-year period on the periphery of the local universe.

Look: “Kinopoisk”