A Century of Decembers
By Darrell Lee
December is the month of the solstice, a hinge in time where the Sun pauses before shifting direction. It is fitting, then, that looking back through the Decembers of the last century reveals three pivotal moments that altered the trajectory of human thought. These events—one in art, one in literature, and one in science—do not merely sit next to each other in history books; they map a specific evolution in humanity's views of the State, the truth, and the future. My story begins exactly one hundred years ago, with a film that sought to build a new collective reality.
On December 21, 1925, inside the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Soviet elite gathered to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. The centerpiece of the evening was the premiere of Sergei Eisenstein's silent film, Battleship Potemkin. To call Potemkin a movie is to misunderstand its intent. In 1925, cinema was not merely entertainment; it was considered a scientific tool for rewiring the human consciousness. Eisenstein, a young director obsessed with the mechanics of engineering and psychology, believed that by arranging images in a specific rhythmic sequence—a technique he called "montage"—he could physically compel the audience to feel revolutionary fervor. He did not want to show them a story; he wanted to install an ideology like a computer program.
The film depicts a mutiny aboard a Tsarist battleship, culminating in the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps, a large, greenish-gray stone staircase 466 feet long, considered a formal entrance into the city of Odessa, Ukraine, from the direction of the sea. The images depicted in the scene, the rhythmic march of the faceless Cossacks, the shattered eyeglasses of the schoolteacher, the baby carriage rolling perilously down the stairs, Eisenstein cut these images together with the precision of a surgeon to create the desired effect. He made a synthetic reality that felt more real than the truth.
The lesson of Battleship Potemkin was one of supreme, intoxicating optimism in the power of the collective. In the film, there are no individual protagonists. The hero is the Mass. The sailors act as one organism; the people of Odessa move as one wave. In typical Communist propaganda style, the film declares that the State, when seized by the people, becomes a vehicle for justice and utopia. It argues that art and technology can be harnessed to perfect the human soul. In 1925, the world was still recovering from the Great War, but the modernists believed they could engineer a better future. Potemkin was the high-water mark of this belief. It argued that if we could edit reality correctly—if we could cut out the bad frames and splice together the good ones—we could create a paradise on Earth. The core of the program being installed declared that the individual was a materialistic concept; the future belonged to the crowd. What it left hidden was the cruelty.
Fast forward forty-eight years. The dream of 1925 had curdled into a bleak, bare-shelved, gray, concrete reality. In December 1973, a small Paris publishing house released a Russian-language manuscript smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm. The book was titled The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. The author was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If Potemkin was the construction of a beautiful lie, The Gulag Archipelago was the forensic excavation of the truth. Solzhenitsyn did not use montage. He did not care for the synthetic reality; he used the blunt, heavy tools of journalism, oral history, and personal witness to document the vast network of forced labor camps that had devoured tens of millions of Soviet citizens—the very same Masses that Eisenstein had celebrated.
The timing of this release was explosive. By December 1973, the West was gripped by détente. Western leaders wanted to coexist with the Soviet Union; they sought to ignore its moral rot. Solzhenitsyn made that impossible. He documented, with obsessive detail, how the collective hero of 1925 had become the jailer and executioner of 1973. He showed that when you strip the individual of value in favor of the State, you do not get the triumphant sailors of Potemkin; you get the frozen corpses of the Kolyma highway, a road where hundreds of thousands of Stalin's political prisoners and forced laborers were buried beneath or around its foundation during its construction.
In 1925, art was a weapon used by the State to define truth. In 1973, literature was a weapon used to reclaim truth against the State. Solzhenitsyn's work demonstrated that the montage of history had omitted the most critical frame: the suffering of the single, fragile human being. The Gulag Archipelago marked the death of the Modernist idea that humanity could be engineered. It was a return to the moral absolute of the individual. The Mass was no longer the hero; the Mass was the accomplice to mass murder. The hero was the Zek, the slang term for an inmate, Solzhenitsyn's own experience and writings highlighted how refusing to accept the State's manufactured reality and acknowledging the line between good and evil within oneself was a path to spiritual survival and resistance for the prisoners. Solzhenitsyn's Soviet Union is what the Reagan administration brilliantly brought to an end, only to see it rise again in a more brutal, mafia-style form under Vladimir Putin. The current administration has forgotten the DNA of the Russian adversary that Western democracies have faced over the last 100 years.
We jump forward another four decades, to December 21, 2015—exactly ninety years to the day after the premiere of Battleship Potemkin. The setting is not a theater in Moscow or a printing press in Paris, but a concrete landing pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. At 8:29 PM, a white streak of fire appeared in the night sky, moving the wrong way. A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, having just delivered satellites to orbit, was falling back to Earth. In all spaceflights before this day, rockets were disposable—discarded, extremely expensive trash that sank to the bottom of the ocean. But this machine, controlled by algorithms several orders of magnitude more complex than Eisenstein's montage, fired its engines, slowed its descent, and touched down gently on Landing Zone 1. It stood upright, hissing steam, a soot-smeared monolith of a new age. This event marked a shift in the narrative of human ambition. In 1925, the pinnacle of technology, the cinema and industry, was dedicated to the State. In 1973, the Apollo era, sandwiched between our dates, space exploration was the ultimate expression of National power. But by 2015, the State had retreated. The Apollo era was a distant memory. NASA had retired the Space Shuttle four years prior. The US government had become slow, debt-ridden, polarized, and paralyzed.
The landing of the Falcon 9 marked the privatization of tasks once reserved for only powerful governments. It signaled that the next great leap in human capacity would not come from a collective acting as one, nor from a dissident revealing the truth, but from a corporation engineering an escape. The SpaceX moment of December 2015 carries a specific philosophical weight when viewed against 1925 and 1973. Eisenstein wanted to fix the world through revolution. Solzhenitsyn wanted to fix the world through repentance. The modern space movement suggests that the world might not be fixable at all—and that our destiny lies in leaving it. The reusable rocket is not a monument to a utopia here on Earth; it is a bridge to a Plan B on Mars. The New Space race is not a mass movement; it is a technological feat driven by a tiny group of engineers and billionaires. We are no longer encouraged to be the sailors on the battleship; we are just spectators watching the livestream on our phones. We are not included in this elite group's future plans. The agency has shifted from the populace to the billionaires and politicians. And observing this elite class, I have found one behavior to be consistent, no matter what society they come from: the wealthy and influential don't mind spending their money to separate themselves from the commoners. Whether it is a house in a gated community, a different section on an airplane, or the VIP high-limit room at the casino. What we are talking about here is the ultimate separation. If the billionaires gain control of our nation's space exploration programs, they will gladly use our taxpayers' dollars to build their self-sustaining habitat far, far away and talk about how it will benefit all the people of this planet. However, please make no mistake, when things get bad enough, when the climate spins out of control with a runaway greenhouse effect, when famine and disease are killing millions, they or their descendants will leave us, on this dying planet, to bicker over our fractured sense of truth.
In 1925, truth was something to be constructed. In 1973, truth was something to be revealed. In 2015 and the years that followed, truth became something to be bypassed. The Falcon 9 landing occurred just as the "Post-Truth" era began to swallow Western democracy—while our rockets achieved pinpoint precision, our social reality—fractured by algorithms—lost coherence. We mastered rocket guidance systems while simultaneously losing the ability to guide our own societies. We can land a building-sized cylinder from space on a postage stamp, yet we cannot agree on the efficacy of a shot that stopped a global pandemic or the reality of a warming planet.
The hero of 1925 was the Mutineer—the one who seizes the ship for the people. The hero of 1973 was the witness—the one who remembers the dead by name. The hero of 2015 was the Engineer—the one who solved the physics problem. We looked at the Falcon 9 and felt a surge of hope that we did not, and still don't feel when we look at Congress or the UN. We have decided that the laws of physics are the only laws that cannot be corrupted. That lost feeling of hope is really ignorance in disguise. Ignorance is the root cause of the sense of helplessness that keeps us from changing our path; the powerful want the masses to feel that way. Ignorance in any form makes you vulnerable to manipulation, but particularly ignorance of history and science.
As we stand in the present day, looking back at these three Decembers, I see a concerning evolution. December 1925 taught us that art can make us believe in a dream, but December 1973 taught us that art can hide the fact that those dreams can build concentration camps. December 2015 offered us a shiny exit strategy, a promise that technology can transcend our political failures. But we cannot board the rocket without bringing the Odessa Steps and the Archipelago in our luggage. The Falcon 9 is a magnificent, technologically advanced machine, but it is empty. It requires human cargo. And that cargo is the same flawed, dangerous class of our species that lied and manipulated to make the masses cheer for the massacre in Eisenstein's film and to turn a blind eye to Solzhenitsyn's labor camps. In the worst-case scenario, if we must start over on another planet, we'll need a better seed crop.
There are only ten days left in this year's December. The challenge I offer you for 2026 is to help our democracy reconcile these three dates. Your help can be done in a variety of ways. Spend the next year donating your time or money to a worthy organization that promotes science (bonus points if its primary purpose is teaching science to the young), educating yourself on the unbiased facts of the issues of today, and using that knowledge when voting at the ballot box in the midterm elections next November.
We need the collective ambition of 1925 without its cruelty. We need the unsparing truth-telling of 1973 without its despair. And we need the technological brilliance of 2015 without its escapism. We must find a way to land the rocket, not just on a concrete pad in Florida, but on a solid moral foundation. We must require the leaders of our democracy to base their character, their treatment of others, and their policy decisions on this ethical foundation. We must build on this foundation to solve our problems, reach our full potential as a just society, and help our planet and our society heal itself. If we fail, we or our descendants will be the left-behinds in someone else's Plan B.
Darrell Lee is the founder and editor of The Long Views, he has written two science fiction novels exploring themes of technological influence, science and religion, historical patterns, and the future of society. His essays draw on these long-standing interests and apply a similar analytical lens to politics, literature, art, culture, and historical events. After retiring from a 36-year career as a software and systems engineer on the Space Shuttle and then the Space Station programs, he now splits his time between rural east Texas and Florida’s west coast, where he spends his days performing variable star photometry, dabbling in astrophotography, thinking, napping, fishing, and writing, not necessarily in that order.