The Voice of the Universe (1991)

Pulp fiction meets Scientology meets QAnon in post-Soviet Russia

The last two Fridays (1, 2), we’ve looked at “satirical journals” of the First Russian Revolution (1905—1907), which addressed their tumultuous time with a mix of art, poetry, dark humor, and literary fiction.

Today we’ll take a look at the one-of-a-kind newspaper of 1990s, The Voice of the Universe. A brainchild of the hypergraphic sci-fi writer Yuriy Petukhov, it used a mix of science fiction, conspiracy theory, demonology, art, and low-brow, xenophobic politics to express the hopes and anxieties of a period that could be called the Fourth Revolution (February and October of 1917 being, respectively, the Second and the Third).

The Voice of the Universe is sui generis. When I try to think of similar projects, what comes to mind is the Church of Scientology: both Hubbard and Petukhov were mediocre writers, but their stories still managed to captivate people, because they were put in very unusual contexts—Hubbard turned his into religious texts, delivered to true believers as a part of …