It’s the most famous piece of TV footage in history. A grainy black-and-white shot of a man in a spacesuit gingerly descending a ladder, and as he sets foot on the surface of the moon he speaks. But he doesn’t say “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
He speaks in Russian, and it’s a moment before we get the translation: “I take this step for my country, my people, and for the Marxist-Leninist way of life, knowing that today is but one step on a journey which some day will take us all to the stars.”
This devastatingly simple historical revisionism is how the 2019 TV series For All Mankind begins. It posits an alternate history in which Alexei Leonov rather than Neil Armstrong is the first man on the moon, prompting the continuation of the space race for decades afterwards. With season three due to air later this year, For All Mankind has found itself more resonant in these fractured times than its creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nevidi could surely have envisaged.
This resonance manifests in several ways. Most obviously, it puts the Cold War front and centre at a time when Russian revanchism and imperialism is dominating the headlines. This has extended even to space itself, in real life as in fiction. Last month Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, posted a video on Twitter that threatened to leave American astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the International Space Station after his scheduled deployment there ends on March 30. Roscosmos later dismissed Rogozin’s video as a “joke’, though one could perhaps forgive Vande Hei for not seeing the funny side.
“What-if?” historical fiction has traditionally revolved around the Nazis winning World War Two: Fatherland, The Man In The High Castle and SS-GB have all successfully mined this trope. In contrast, Soviet success in the Cold War has largely been overlooked. The conflict itself was less dramatic, capitalism’s victory may always have seemed inevitable with hindsight, and Orwell’s totalitarian vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four is so iconic that trying to ape it appears otiose.
