The Strugatsky brothers’ Soviet sci-fi classic ‘Hard to Be a God’ took aim at dictatorship. Russia’s new state-backed TV adaptation strips away the politics.

The streaming platform Wink is releasing a series called “Hard to Be a God,” based on the novel by the Strugatsky brothers. The creators have noticeably changed the book’s plot: now we follow Earth’s envoy, Don Rumata, from his very first days working in Arkanar. There are more characters and more adventures, but the most important thing has vanished: a coherent vision of a utopian future and the theme of science as the driving force of progress. Where Aleksei German argued with the Strugatskys’ novel in his famous film, the series’ creators simply prefer to ignore the inconvenient parts. Crit