It is a tangent, but it's one that I'm interested in. I was looking about how speculative fiction in the West (particularly during the Cold War) tended to choose villains with a "hivemind" mentality, where the ultimate fear is of the individual losing his individuality (or at a minimum, freedom to be individual). It's interesting that if one looks at this from a traditional Eastern (specifically, Buddhist) perspective, Western speculative fiction would be seen as an exaggerated response on the part of the ego. This assessment might be worth exploring because the "hivemind" villain remains popular even after the end of the Cold War (and presumably, the fear of communism that it represents is gone).

Soviet speculative fiction seemed to break down into two categories: utopian and dystopian. The emphasis on building a socialist utopia was so strong in society that speculative fiction would ultimately show an end result that reflected the author's prejudices. Alexei Tolstoy's Aelita envisions taking the communist gospel to Mars and making the red planet politically red as well. It glorifies technological progress and the inevitability of the socialist triumph.

By contrast, Bulgakov's Heart of the Dog and The Fateful Eggs show technological progress going terribly wrong as the result of blind faith about the inevitable triumph of technology and socialism. Zamyatin's We goes even farther to show a world where there is no private life, an ultimately sterile and stagnant world. Both authors were far too direct in their criticisms, though, which led to censorship of their writings.

People who did get published, like Evgenii Shvarts (whose Dragon is a criticism of Stalin) or Kir Bulychev, best known for Guest from the Future, were much more subtle in their criticism. However, Bulychev is generally not considered "literature" because his criticism is minor enough that the work is no longer studied as a means of political dissent.

Shvarts is studied as a writer of political dissent, but only in academic circles. Most Russians know him for his story Obyknovennoe Chudo, which was made into a popular movie with memorable songs and dance numbers, which is closer to a fairy tale with a moral than outright political dissent and certainly not as subversive as other works of his.