Vasyl Berezhnyi lost his communist ardour in 1980s

Reading Ukrainian science fiction writers of the 1950s who lived to the 1980s, it is very funny to observe the evolution of their views. In the 1950s, they wrote novels and short stories about joint Soviet-American exploration of the Moon. A Vasyl Berezhnyi’s typical plot (novel “To the starry worlds” is published in 1955), when Soviet astronauts arrive on the Moon and are confronted there by greedy, evil, mean and pathetic American astronauts, depicted in the worst traditions of Soviet propaganda of the 1950s.

Vasyl Berezhnyi. “To the starry worlds” novel was published in 1955. The book is cover is full of Soviet positivist optimism and faith in the communist future of humanity.

Of course, Berezhnyi himself never met any American astronaut (and even any American) in his life, but took their image from Soviet newspapers.
And already in the 1980s in his short story collection “Labyrinth” (1986), Berezhnyi does not even mention a single American.

Vasyl Berezhnyi. “Labyrinth” short-story collection was published in 1986. Even from the cover it is clear that faith has given way to doubt.

He writes a story about an old, sick and poor Soviet astrophysicist who has achieved nothing in his life. He meets the wife of a now deceased astrophysicist and she shows him a pile of his scientific papers, half of which she had already used as toilet paper. From the leftovers, the astrophysicist learns that his deceased colleague discovered the “Formula of the Cosmos”. But his wife flushed the formula down the toilet a long time ago. The astrophysicist explains to the deceased’s wife that this is a very valuable formula. The wife thinks that she can finally get a lot of money for this and decides to help him. This is happening at a time when the USSR is already collapsing, unable to withstand competition with the USA, poverty is everywhere, people are standing in lines for at least some food, and all the streets, as if to mock them, are named after the dead and now absolutely useless communist leaders. In the end, the astrophysicist recovers the formula of the cosmos, but when he and the wife of the deceased colleague are walking down the Kyiv street, the man and woman slip on the ice, the woman falls and kicks the astrophysicist in the chest, which stops his heart pacemaker, he dies, and all the papers with the magic Formula of the Cosmos that he was preparing blown by the wind.