From an earlier answer of mine

Part I

One of the staple observations on Eastern bloc SF during the Cold War made by Western writers was that SF behind the Iron Curtain treated the specter of nuclear annihilation as a taboo. Exploring this dystopian possibility for humanity implied that the Soviet military was unable to prevent such an occurrence, moreover, total annihilation also implied that the Soviet government shared responsibility for this type of holocaust. While it is true that there was a taboo against depicting nuclear destruction, Eastern bloc SF could not escape the realities of the atomic age, and that included the potential use of nuclear weapons or other WMDs. Yet Eastern bloc creators tended to approach the nuclear genie in a different fashion than their Western counterparts. Evgeny Voiskunsky, one of Soviet cultural gatekeepers of SF, would write in 1981 that

Foreign (Western) science fiction focuses attention on the horrors of the future (the extinction of mankind in thermonuclear war, ecological disasters, monstrous mutations, the withering away of all spiritual life in the midst of material affluence, and so on). This has a certain justification—humanity needs to be warned… But it is one thing to warn and another to frighten, and here Western writers often go too far.

Voiskunsky’s observation does not preclude the discussion of nuclear war in Eastern bloc SF, but it does provide an insight into how Eastern bloc SF treated the bomb. Eastern bloc SF did not ignore the possibility of nuclear warfare, but it did tend to treat the possibility in an oblique manner.

Of course, Eastern bloc consumers of SF had access to some Western SF critical of the West’s cavalier approach to nuclear weapons. The 1959 film On the Beach did receive a gala showing in Moscow, one of the first for a major American motion picture. Ray Bradbury’s antinuclear short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” along with other works by Bradbury were translated in the USSR and later received a haunting animated adaptation. Dystopian fiction produced in the West buttressed the state ideology that capitalism was innately piratical and expansionistic and the presence of public intellectuals like Bradbury was a sign that some in the West recognized that the USSR was on the right side of history.

Yet, Western visions of nuclear apocalypse were something of a minority in the Eastern bloc SF scene. Creators like the Polish SF writer Stanisław Lem had access to Western materials and occasionally corresponded with Western SF creators, but this was far from the norm. Instead, Eastern bloc SF tended to develop its own indigenous approach to nuclear weapons that occasionally incorporated Western tropes and motifs. Valentin Ivanov’s 1951 novel The Energy Is Under Our Dominion used tropes from spy novels as NKVD agents bravely foiled a plot by Western intelligence to detonate a nuclear device inside the USSR was one example of this borrowing. Leonid Zhigarev 1958 short-story “Green Light” was a direct response to Heinlein’s “The Long Watch”, which appeared translated in same issue of the SF journal Znanie-Sila. In contrast to Heinlein’s protagonist that adventurously uses nuclear weapons to prevent a dictator from using them, Zhigarev presents a protagonist at a Soviet nuclear facility who hopes that the green light indicating peace will always stay green. But these works were somewhat exceptional. The bulk of Eastern SF thus had to contend with the wider culture and politics of the Eastern bloc, and the result was superficially quite different than Western SF on this issue.

Like much of popular culture within the Eastern bloc, SF had to operate under the burden of having to fit inside a Marxist-Leninist weltanschauung. This posed a dilemma for Eastern bloc SF somewhat more so than popular music or poetry. The central conceit for SF is that it provides a vision of the future while Marxist-Leninism posits that it is the future. Marx predicted a utopian golden age after the revolution and seizure of production by the proletariat after an indeterminate period of proletarian government. One of the major ideological points of the USSR was that its socialism would create Marx’s communism in the not too distant future. This constrained Eastern bloc SF creators in that it was difficult to deviate from what the state held as orthodoxy.

Ivan Yefremov’s landmark 1957 novel Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale exemplified the difficulties in portraying the future for eastern bloc creators. Yefremov spends a great deal of the novel exploring the now ageless utopia achieved by communism in which national differences are now subsumed in a paradise. The 1967 film adaptation tries to do justice to the novel’s utopianism, including a rather odd animated dance number at 16:00), in which humanity is part of a wider, interplanetary federation of like-minded communist utopia, the Great Ring. Yefremov’s vision meshed well into Marxist-Leninist precepts that revolution and subsequent communism were the inevitable results of history, yet the specter of nuclear annihilation is present in some parts of the novel. Andromeda’s text refers to the twentieth century as the “age of disunity” and notes this was a time when humanity unwisely experimented with unsafe forms of nuclear energy. The consequences of such experimentation is briefly explored in the novel’s prologue in which an earth starship orbits a world in which nuclear experimentation has destroyed the planet Zirda. Although Yefremov left the type of experimentation vague, the novel does demonstrate a degree of uncertainty about the safety of nuclear science.

Displacing the responsibility for global nuclear destruction onto an alien culture was a literary device used in Lem’s first novel, The Astronauts in 1951. Like many other Eastern bloc SF writers, Lem created a vision in which communism has triumphed and transformed the world, this time in the distant year 2003. The discovery of a remnants of a Venusian probe spark an international expedition to the planet, which discovers that the probe was a warning that the Venusians sought to colonize earth Unfortunately for these Venusian imperialists, their own nuclear genie escaped and a nuclear civil war destroyed the planet. While the politics of The Astronauts was obvious, the joint Polish-GDR film adaptation, 1960’s The Silent Star had an even sharper political edge. In the film, the Cold War is still raging, albeit with the Eastern bloc in clear ascendency, and the American astronaut for the expedition goes into space against the wishes of his capitalist government. The Japanese crewmember also references Hiroshima and various parts of the film dredge up America’s use of nuclear weapons on Japan. Interestingly, the film did have a US release, retitled as The First Spaceship on Venus, albeit Crown Picture’s cut of the film deleted all of this political critique and that was the version ruthlessly mocked by MST3K.

Both The Astronauts and Andromeda feature as their central plot the tale of a peaceful communist spaceship travelling to a distant worlds. While travelling from utopia to utopia did not always make for high drama, the trip itself could provide commentary about politics as well as serve a hard SF pedagogical function. The 1963 Czechoslovakian SF film Ikarie XB 1 features just such an expedition of peaceful exploration and colonization, but has a horrifying interlude onboard a derelict Western spacecraft. The Ikarie’s AI tells the cosmonauts that the ship dated from the 1980s when capitalism went into its terminal crisis. A group of wealthy capitalists, complete with cocktail dresses and tuxedos, left earth with their riches rather than bow to the inevitable triumph of the proletariat. Although the nationality is unstated, the use of English signs on the ship and the American military uniforms clearly signal this is a US vessel. Unfortunately, the ship’s passengers and crew were killed by an experimental nerve agent, Tigger Fun, when the capitalists turned on each other.

Not all depictions of a nuclear apocalypse were located in deep space in Eastern bloc SF. But the same pattern of displacing responsibility for nuclear warfare onto others was common even in these terrestrially-based SF. Leonid Leonov’s short-story “Mr McKinley’s Escape,” serialized in Pravda over the course of 1961 and adapted into a film in 1975 exemplified this trend. The story’s protagonist is a capitalist everyman worried both about the rat-race of his materialistic society and the specter of nuclear annihilation. The central SF conceit of the story is a suspended animation process, available only to the West’s super-rich, in which they could step out of their fractious time and emerge in a more quiescent future. Ten minutes into the film adaptation, McKinley presents a Terry Gilliam-esque animated commercial for the hibernation process in which nuclear destruction features quite prominently along with other fears of sudden violence. In Ariadna Gromova’s 1965 short story “In the Circle of Light” the nuclear holocaust is quite real, but unlike Leonov, she sets the action in a devastated France. In a relative rarity for Soviet SF and fiction in general, Gromova directly referenced the Holocaust in this story as French camp survivors now must contemplate how the same mentality that allowed Auschwitz lives on in the prospect of nuclear war and would continue afterwards.