What was the Soviet’s idea of “the far off distant year of 1999” like?
More can be said of course, but there are a few old threads which might be of interest for this:
A number of answers between the two of those!
There were quite a few science fiction writers in Eastern Block like the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem whose book, The Magellanic Cloud, was made into a Czechoslovak movie in 1963, the Voyage to the End of the Universe. Czechoslovak writer F. Behounek was extremely popular science-fiction writer in the 50s and 60s with novels, Robinson of the Universe and Action L about colonization of the Moon.
In the Czechoslovak literature, there are three distinct phases in postwar literature. The first phase was tied to directly to the interwar production influenced by foreigner and domestic writers like Capek. The 1950s were heavily influenced by Stalinism and censorship, but there was a strong trauma from the WWII and a fear of a nuclear war, so the genre was appealing into humanity and peaceful future. This can be deducted from J. Weiss about Guess about the Future. The space race produced a lot of literature for children and youth, which were popular between 1957-1968/70. The Czechoslovak literature experienced a significant freedom and relaxation in the 60s where the communist control over publishing, media, literature, and education weakened. This culminated in the 1968 when the censorship was officially abolished. Thus, in the late 1960s, the Czechoslovak society was well supplied by translation of science fiction from the West, East, and own production. The return of censorship hit the literature and media between 1970-1988 was far less free than it was in 1960s.