Starting May 29 and until mid-July, the Apple TV streaming service features the series "Star City" – a spin-off of the sci-fi "For All Mankind" (a six-season series, with the seventh and final season coming out next year) – about an alternative reality of space flights where Soviet cosmonauts were the first to land on the Moon. Film critic Irina Karpova watched the first episodes of "Star City" and was pleasantly surprised: it's a spy thriller with a very serious approach to depicting the reality of a Soviet regime facility. A frame from the series "Star City." Source: imdb.com.Comrade Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), a war hero who killed a dozen Germans with her bare hands and, concurrently, a KGB officer responsible for security in Star City, interrogates her subordinate Comrade Morozova (Agnes O’Casey), whose duties include eavesdropping and documenting conversations of space mission participants. The following dialogue takes place: "Where are you from?" – "From Moscow." – "From where specifically?" – "Rublyovka." – "I felt it. Privileged." This is perhaps the only moment in the series where a significant "cranberry" element surfaces: the concept of "Rublyovka" did not yet exist in the late 60s, despite the dachas of officials and diplomats along Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. The second "cranberry" juice splash occurs when Morozova visits her daughter's music teacher. "I'll have black tea," she replies to the offer of tea. If "Rublyovka" is a shimmering future, a hallucination of the writers' intellect (which is not unique to AI), then the desire for black tea is like a spy's "ouch" instead of "oh": in the USSR, one does not choose the type of tea. However, these are minor flaws for a work set in a fictional USSR. Alexey Leonov became the first person to set foot on the Moon (in reality, lunar missions in the USSR were frozen), and then a crew with a woman is sent there. She is Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert), a backup cosmonaut, after Raskova mistakenly draws parallels between the first candidate, the universally beloved Yana Akhmatova (Niv Algar), and a dissident with the same surname. Yana's stellar career and life quickly end, and the audience is presented with an absolute monster in the form of Colonel Raskova – a burning heart, a cold head, and blood-stained, but undoubtedly clean, hands, according to Felix Dzerzhinsky's formula. A frame from the series "Star City." Source: imdb.com.The real-life Soviet pilot and war hero Raskova was unlucky that her name was given to a bloodthirsty KGB agent, but there is logic in this: the outstanding film and theater actress Anna Maxwell Martin plays not just a uniformed officer (although I am sure her human side will be revealed by the end of the season), but the embodiment of Soviet power as seen from the outside: she is that very Sofya Vlasyevna, a ruthless utilitarian machine leading everyone towards building communism. Of course, Colonel Raskova will be on guard and fully armed, and the tension will rise like pressure in a faulty device when it turns out that there is a "mole" in the closed scientific city, an unknown enemy signal transmitter was found on the mission to the Moon, and the chief designer Sergey Korolev (Rhys Ifans) is planning a secret space flight behind the KGB's back – and not to the Moon at all… "Star City" is good because, being a derivative product in both essence and form, it incorporates various spheres of Soviet life and space exploration, and it is at these intersections that something alive and real begins to sparkle. The life and work in a closed elite scientific institute was also shown and explored by Ilya Khrzhanovsky's megalomaniacal project "Dau" (about the life of Lev Landau), but it seems no one except critics watched it – the films from the "Dau" cycle did not receive a distribution license in the Russian Federation, and the online platform where they were shown existed for a very short time. The "Dau" project explored the nature of totalitarianism using totalitarian methods, which also extended to the viewers. They had to decide during the viewing how to react to the fact that the deceased neo-Nazi Maxim Martsinkevich, nicknamed "Tesak," cuts a live pig on screen (in another scene, the heroine is threatened with rape with a bottle, and a real prison guard interrogates her). A frame from the series "Star City." Source: imdb.com.Unlike the transgressive exercises in totalitarianism at others' expense in "Dau," "Star City" invites viewers to connect with the characters, the actors of a system that the creators of the series consider and portray as repressive and inhuman without additional analysis. And – surprise! – it turns out that these characters are strange, diverse, very, and even too human inside, not just robotic Soviet organisms. The dramatic arc of Irina Morozova is copied from the Stasi officer in the film "The Lives of Others" (Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film 2006), and the acting charm here drowns out the moments of implausibility (which were also present in the German film), bringing to the surface the main point: we are looking at a cog in the system, but it has empathy. While spying on privileged fellow citizens, she develops sympathy for these people and their small acts of defiance against the Soviet regime. Australian actress Alice Englert plays a very fragile and sensitive version not even of Valentina Tereshkova, but of Yuri Gagarin – first, she took someone else's place on the mission, and then a new place and role, completely alien to her, was assigned to her – that of a ceremonial figurehead, an exhibitionist female exhibit of Soviet achievements. Belikova embodies Soviet progress and success, and therefore is too valuable to fly into space again. A frame from the series "Star City." Source: imdb.com."Star City" is pleasantly surprising in how many women it features, possessing various degrees of power and influence. The scientific institutes of the 60s and the KGB were closed male clubs, but not in the Soviet Union imagined by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore. Here, a woman can be not only a cosmonaut but also a terrifying dominatrix in uniform (her kink is communism), an agent on a mission, and even the wife of an important man might turn out to be a dissident. Of course, there is also a female scientist – and she is from India! At first, this causes slight bewilderment, but it turns out that gender-blind casting does not affect the plot development at all, but simply allows talented actresses to shine in roles that would be played by men in a more conventional project. At the same time, the male characters are not at all neglected – there is a "mole," a rebellious lover, and Korolev himself; they are simply not the overwhelming majority. "Star City" characters walk Soviet streets and live in Soviet apartments with an unmistakably recognizable way of life – simultaneously familiar and drab in its monotony. The level of detail is comparable to the series "Chernobyl." All this became possible because the characters wander through Vilnius, with its Soviet legacy of residential areas. The effect of these streets and apartments is similar to what Andrey Zvyagintsev created in "The Minotaur," assembling late 2022 Moscow and its region from Riga and its surroundings: it's a feeling of being in a strange dream where everything is familiar to you. And this is precisely what fills "Star City" with a sense of authenticity: the Soviet in it is not artificial, it is real; these are real Soviet houses and apartments (plus, perhaps, very talented production designers). This genuine universal Sovietness (for instance, one of the Stalin-era Moscow houses was filmed in Sofia) creates a sense of a cage – not even a golden one, but a concrete one, overseen by Lyudmila Raskova. How many differences are there between this cage, with its advanced scientific research and space flights, and a prison cell – or are there any at all? Special rations? There is a strong desire to escape from it, and the characters do so in the only way possible for them – by flying to the stars.