OCTOBRIANA: The Genesis Of A Comics Legend -- page four It may seem easy enough to invent a character such as Octobriana. But remember that the people who invented her were to all intents and purpose cut off, that they were not familiar with comparable Western creations -- Barbarella, Superman, or, in a smaller way, James Bond. Indeed Octobriana pretended you have to give them credit for a great deal of imagination and ingenuity. And quite apart from being a sort of Joan of Arc in a time machine, this super-heroine had to embody that other area of exotic from which Soviet youth are excluded. Octobriana was not only a vehicle for their idealistic political dreams; she had also to embody their wildest sexual fantasies, taking the place of the Playboy gatefold girls, the mini-skirted dollies of permissive Western society and the bra and corset ads. Yet whatever excursions into the exotic they undertook, the artists of PPP always clung to this symbolic figure of Octobriana. Octobriana was their symbol, and they did not always need a strip cartoon to make use of her. In the West, one would have expected the members of PPP to have been pot smokers at least, and probably acid trippers, which would have fitted perfectly into their philosophy of escapism. As it is, drugs are virtually unknown in the Soviet Union, except for a few variants of hash in Central Asia. Yet PPP was not unaware of their existence or of their effect. In one of their most pessimistic and anti-Soviet stories -- Better A Neanderthal Than A Komsomol -- in which every possible Communist value was comprehensively negated, Octobriana gave up her last illusions about ideal Communism and sought oblivion in narcotic, erotic and adventurous orgies. If, from all the material I ever saw of the PPP output, I had to choose one item which best summarised their attitude to the Soviet State, Soviet reality, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there is no doubt where my choice would fall. When the Mensheviks told Lenin before the 1917 October Revolution that no single Party could establish and maintain control over the great inchoate mass of Russia, Lenin replied ­ and his answer is now part of the Holy Writ of Communism -- "There is such a Party -- the Party of the Bolsheviks." Those words -- 'There is such a Party' -- are rendered economically in Russian by three words which have now achieved the status of a proverb: Yest' Takaya Partiya. To understand the effect on a fully indoctrinated Soviet Communist seeing them reproduced as they are here, you have to imagine a monarchist seeing "God save the Queen," or an Evangelical Christian seeing "God is Love," written in a similarly irreverent way. And this bitter irreverence is what gives PPP its strength and at the same time makes it so vulnerable to persecution. Although Octobriana was the PPP artists' first love, there were other pin-ups. One series was used first by the group as playing cards. Later when the suits and numbers had been painted out, they appeared in the magazines illustrating PPP's provocative call "To all, to all, to all" (Lenin's words): 'If you're a real Komsomol girl, it's not enough to read Komsomolskaya Pravda and Pravda everyday. Have the biggest possible five-pointed star tattooed on your behind or wherever you like. When the next round of purges and trials comes along, it might be a point in your favour. They'll only shoot you, not send you to a camp.' There was an enormous flood of Octobriana literature published in Mtsyry. Two of the complete comic strips -- Octobriana And The Atomic Suns Of Chairman Mao and The Living Sphinx Of The Kamchatka Radioactive Volcano -- can be found later in this book (Stu: ie, the strips were reproduced in Sadecky's book, Octobriana And The Russian Underground. A modern rendition of The Living Sphinx is reproduced within Artful Salamander's Octobriana: Underground Tales.). written by Petr Sadecky 1971 Ends Back Index