The Communist Extraterrestrial

A World Without Religion

For a young person raised in a communist society, where systematic atheism – also known as “dialectical and historical materialism” – was the official state doctrine, one of the rare opportunities during the ’85 era to learn about religion was by reading the works of the renowned historian from the University of Chicago, Mircea Eliade. A Romanian novelist and philosopher who specialized in Indian philosophy, he was regarded by most members of my generation as a true model. When, in 1981, the first volume of his final synthesis of the history of religions, Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (A History of Religious Ideas), was translated and published in Bucharest, the impact was considerable. Tens of thousands of copies were being sold, even more than the increasingly scarce foods, like cheese or salami. My parents could not manage to purchase it. The booksellers kept the books hidden to offer them, in exchange for monetary benefits or influential connections, to the “chosen” customers. And the “chosen” were none other than the Communist leaders, doctors, and lawyers. Fortunately, a friend of my mother was a nurse. Through a labyrinthine network of relationships, she managed to obtain a copy of the first volume of Eliade’s history. That’s how I ended up reading, for the first time, descriptions of rituals, ascetic practices, and religious ideas of the ancient Jews, Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, as well as yogis and Christian monks.

The extensive bibliography at the end of the book, accumulated by Eliade over more than 50 years of diligent reading, impressed me the most. Young at heart, I quickly arrived at a conclusion as simple as it was wise. If so many and so many scholars of all kinds – historians, classicists, theologians, philosophers, sociologists – had dedicated their lives to researching and writing so many books, then this must mean that religion is something serious, correct?

Eager to learn more and more, guided by Eliade, I embarked on the lengthy journey that led me towards the theology and philosophy of the Christian tradition. I voraciously read everything that came into my hands. Noticing my unusual interest, a courageous French language teacher, a practicing Catholic named Doina Morariu, began lending me books that led me to two positive conclusions related to some of the most important themes: the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Among the books – usually in French – borrowed from her was one that contained a text by Eliade about shamanism and a story of the life of Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.

Such “exotic” readings could not go unnoticed. More curious than intrusive, on an October evening in 1986, my mother asked to see what I was reading. With naive enthusiasm, typical of new continent explorers, I showed her. After flipping through the contents of the books, her face metamorphosed into an expression of horror, and she would have screamed if her voice hadn’t been stifled by a surge of emotions: “If ‘they’ catch us with such books, we won’t see anymore the light of day!” That terrifying “they” referred to the members of the communist secret police, the so-called “Securitate” (Security), who were in charge of arresting and even killing political dissidents. As a rebellious teenager, I snorted dismissively. Yet, deep down, I myself was frightened by such a grim prospect. When one lives in Romania under the rule of the last communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, such a possibility isn’t at all implausible. After a discussion held in trembling voices, I promised my mother that I would return the books and wouldn’t share what I had read with anyone. Only the conviction I gained from Eliade’s readings remained firmly unshaken: religion was something serious.

Any form of intellectual curiosity related to subjects labeled as “spirituality” – from New Age movements and parapsychology to Eastern religions or Christian theology – was enough to open for you a wide path to the narrow “red” prisons. Dominating the political stage without opponents between 1947 and 1989, the Romanian Communist Party systematically imposed censorship on any intellectual discourse that would challenge its materialistic doctrine. Although the intensity and rigor of persecution varied over the years, one thing remained constant: fear. Unable to completely control the lives and thoughts of their own citizens, the Romanian dictators knew that nothing was more effective than self-censorship inspired by the fear of reprisals.

Science Fiction for Comrades

Prominent writers, like Vasile Voiculescu and Dinu Pillat, or refined intellectuals such as the essayist Nicolae Steinhardt or the philosopher Constantin Noica, were arrested and convicted as a result of their interests in “spirituality” (a code name for religion) related themes. The communist party didn’t miss any occasion to show that it was unwilling to tolerate lines of thought that questioned, even indirectly, the “achievements of science” on which its Marxist-Leninist ideological propaganda was founded. Alongside all forms of direct censorship, history was systematically rewritten to support the tenets of dialectical materialism. The only allowed meta-narrative was the one about the conflict between exploiters – the nobility and the bourgeoisie – and the exploited – the working class (i.e., “the proletariat”). Those thinkers labeled as “idealists,” whether older or more recent, like Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Kant, or Fichte, were treated with disdain because, according to the Marxist interpretation, they represented “revolute phases” in the history of thought on the path towards a “multilaterally developed socialist society.” Except for fiction literature and classical poetry, cultural creations from the Western world were filtered with utmost vigilance. Technical and scientific innovations presented to the public usually came from the countries of the former communist bloc and, especially, from the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In spite of censorship of texts coming from the Western world, one field seemed to be allowed with almost no restraint: literature featuring green men and lost worlds in the cosmos. Strangely enough, the communists were interested in extraterrestrials.

Among the highly circulated publications of that period, science fiction creations held one of the most important places. Entire collections of short stories, novels, alongside numerous magazines with texts written by the genre fans existed in all the major cities. The number of the groups and literary circles in this field was also significant. Above all of these, one of the most widely read publications reigned without any competitor: Almanahul Anticipația (The Anticipation Almanac), which sold so fast, that it could hardly be found in newsstands and bookstores. To give you an idea of the proportions of this editorial phenomenon, it’s enough to mention the print run of its first edition, released in 1983: 100,000 copies. For a communist country with just over 20 million citizens, this was a colossal figure. Proportional to the scale of the editorial activity, the number of writers venturing into the weird sci-fi territories was substantial.

In addition to those who – both before and after 1989 – were especially concerned with this genre considered by some as “paraliterature,” writers of “realist” literature as well as renowned critics and historians sought a less surveilled editorial niche, in their view, avoiding the draconian rigors of communist censorship. Not directly interested in science fiction, the latter’s names would mostly disappear after the December 1989 Revolution, which led to the fall of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, from genre-specific magazines and publications. Losing the support of the almighty single party, all the magazines and books featuring little green men, time travels, and futuristic worlds reached minuscule print runs, reflecting the actual number of fans. Failing to grasp that their success was a result of the strictly propagandistic interests of the communist party, some of the authors who were acclaimed before 1989 still nostalgically remember the print runs their novels and magazines used to have.

Similarly to the Soviet Union and all its “satellite” countries, political power in Romania instrumentalized sci-fi literature for purely ideological purposes. The example had already been set by Alexander Belyaev (1884-1942), the Soviet author of the famous story Amphibian Man published in 1928. A fervent supporter of those much-claimed “conquests of science” through which the communist party promised the creation of an (eventually) immortal “new man” and perfect society, he didn’t miss any opportunity to attack religion in general and Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular. Following his model, our science fiction writers proposed fictions that usually aligned with the ideological lines drawn by the guardians of the one-party system. This was indeed the case for any type of fiction intended for children and adolescents.

In a comprehensive study dedicated to Vladimir Colin (1921-1991), a master of using literature for ideological purposes, the brilliant critic and historian Cătălin Sturza described the essence of the communist propaganda apparatus. Although he explicitly refers to the more generic category of “fairy tale,” his assessment can equally be applied to the genre we are discussing:

The 20th century exerted, as a whole, a strong ideological pressure on the fairy tale. Especially behind the Iron Curtain, but not only there, attempts were made to redefine the relationship between good and evil and establish a new morality meant to justify various ideologies and political objectives. (…) these social engineers tried to directly influence the fairy tale – as long as the goal of any totalitarian ideology, but especially of communist ideology, was (and is) to have total control over the individual’s soul and mind. In any case, the fairy tale transformed into an instrument of manipulation is diluted and brought down to the profane.

To prevent any confusion, I must add that not all writers shared the Marxist-Leninist convictions of Vladimir Colin. However, the editorial context was entirely controlled by communist censors. The reasons why a dictator like Nicolae Ceaușescu and his subordinates supported science fiction literature were revealed with the utmost accuracy in a conference held over a decade ago by Eugen Stancu:

Through science fiction literature, communism constructs a positive narrative image, metaphysically legitimized by the teleology of history as present in Marxism-Leninism. In this optimistic world, a true realm of daydreaming, myths become ordinary realities. The new man can be encountered at every step, victories against nature, against God and time are evident, while the collective leadership of space functions impeccably as well.

The Green Men and the Communist Dystopia

If the manipulative strategy regarding sci-fi literature is more or less transparent, the communist interest in extraterrestrials was evident not only in the emergence of works produced by Romanian authors like Ion Hobana, Florin Gheorghița, or Mihai E. Șerban, but especially in the translation of international bestsellers. After the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken’s blockbuster, Chariots of the Gods?, had been published in German in 1968 and subsequently translated and released in the American market in 1969 by Souvenir Press, it was also almost immediately translated and released in Romania – in 1970 – under the title Amintiri despre viitor (Memories About the Future). The change of the title illustrates the communists’ aversion to any reference to the God of the Bible or the supernatural beings of ancient pagan religions. Däniken’s influence was immense. All the pseudo-historians mentioned above – and many others like them – are his epigones. “Paleo-astronautics” becomes the favorite subject of many science fiction authors. The main Romanian scientific magazine – Știință și tehnică (Science and Technology) – was often discussing the hypothesis of ancient contacts between the Earthlings and the representatives of civilizations from other worlds.

Concerned with proving the irrationality of the “myths” of the Bible, the Communist ideologues accepted without any problem the explanations of those who “demonstrated” that the visions of the great prophets of the Old Testament or the apocryphal texts attributed to Enoch are nothing more than textual records of “close encounters of the third kind.” The most enthusiastic of them even claimed that these actually recount the experience of cosmic flights – on extraterrestrial spacecrafts, of course – by the authors. Ezekiel would have been not a visionary but an improvised astronaut. Egyptian pyramids, Baalbek Stones, the stone of King Pakal of Palenque, and many other such monuments of antiquity were presented as evidence of contacts with visitors from other worlds. Gathered around festive tables, my parents and their acquaintances wouldn’t say any prayers (they didn’t even know the Lord’s Prayer), but instead, they enthusiastically discussed all these theories. Sensationalist TV documentaries about the “mysteries of history” fueled and exploited the trend encouraged by the propagandists of dialectical materialism. As long as the message of the Bible wasn’t taken seriously for its religious content, explanations of this kind were as good as regular party meetings. In such a context, how could the UFO issue be absent?

Just like in the case of Erich von Däniken’s paleo-astronautics, ufology exploded after the translation of another bestseller. In 1978, six years after the first edition was published, The UFO Experience by astronomer Joseph Allen Hynek was translated into Romanian. In the same year, on the big screens, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas’s Star Wars could be seen. The cinemas were packed with those eager to watch them. Tickets were being sold on the black market. Hynek’s book transformed an experience that should have remained largely fictional and aesthetic into an unshakable religious belief. I still remember how my mother, after watching Spielberg’s movie, startled violently when she heard me humming the famous five-tone musical phrase in a pentatonic scale made by the UFOs – she was convinced that the extraterrestrials could be somewhere nearby. If almost all kids were ready to swear they had seen strange ships in the sky, some schoolmates tried to impress the girls by pretending, in a mysteriously low voice, that they were extraterrestrials. Although bursts of laughter and humor tempered these fervors, everyone, kids and adults, old and young, were convinced that extraterrestrials existed. And how could it be otherwise since they had seen them with their own eyes – in Lucas’s movie – at the cinema?

Unlike ordinary people, the communist comrades lacked the genuine enthusiasm of those who had discovered something new and interesting. Unfortunately, they even lacked humor. For them, politicians preoccupied with creating the “new man,” the interest in green visitors was related to a strictly ideological agenda. These alien beings could have been the irrefutable proof not only of the falsehood of all beliefs and religious ideas which, in fact, had been – as Däniken tries to convince us – camouflaged testimonies of close encounters of the third kind, but also the ultimate evidence of dialectical and historical materialism. According to their interpretation, the evolution of any rational beings, whether from Earth or from the cosmos, could only lead to the emergence of a “developed multilateral socialist society” – that “bright future of humanity” which justified both the dictatorship of the proletariat and its thievery and prison camps. In other words, if extraterrestrials existed, as the science fiction authors told us, they should have – according to the communist dogma – already reached the “peaks of progress and science,” living in a world of perfect equality. After all, scientifically and technologically speaking, they were superior, weren’t they?

The communists never watched a TV series like Star Trek: The Next Generation as mere entertainment. The society depicted there – without classes, without religion, without rich and poor, without monogamous families, with a personal life within a context where the only interests and ideals are those of the Federation (I was almost about to write “of the Party”) – was perfectly aligned with the ideal society that Marxist-Leninist ideology claimed to be advancing toward. But while we can discuss Gene Roddenberry’s reasons for shaping his fictional world that way, in the case of politicians interested in paleo-astronautics and little green beings, we must exercise a cautious and sane prudence. This is particularly necessary now – considering the fact that the American Congress has recently been the venue for hearings focused on ufology. The experience of countries behind the Iron Curtain shows that far from being an idealistic pursuit driven by a genuine thirst for knowledge, in the case of politicians, it can be fueled by the very thing that has caused the most terrible catastrophes in history: the thirst for power or – much worse – the utopian desire to create a materialistic heaven on earth. If the famous ancient Latin proverb teaches us to “beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” a paraphrase adapted to our times might sound as follows: “beware of politicians talking about extraterrestrials.” And I would boldly emphasize: especially then.

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