In the USSR writers of science fiction had the future as a semi-official responsibility. Whatever they invented, they were expected to endorse the radiance to come. But since the future, in Soviet SF as in every other kind, is a refraction of the present anyway, the scope was large for sly commentary on the present, and deniable ironisation of it on terms far freer than in realist Soviet literature, especially when the SF was being written by the brilliantly self-possessed Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
