Anime: Tsuki to Laika to Nosferatu

As this anime is meant to follow real life events, it is weird when it doesn't. For instance, the two pilots in the end were made to make it look like they lived in the capital because the government said so. No such requirement was made in real life as Yuri Gagarin is known to be not from Moscow. Another such example is that they were willing to kill Irina, on whom they spent god knows how much money for some fairly arbitrary reason. There are other inconsistencies with real life events that were made to show that the government is almost evil if not belligerent, but these actions seem unrealistic and uncharacteristic of what could happen in real life in the Soviet Union. That said, certain events, like Irina's family being killed, seem to allude to actual events, probably Stalin's deportations. The character of Chief Designer Korovin seems to be a somewhat accurate portrayal of his real life prototype, Sergei Korolev. A major change from real life is that the cosmonaut is supposed to eject from the spacecraft and parachute down. This was clearly made just to make the two main characters train together with paracchutes. There are a lot of nuances in this anime with regards to realism, but aside from creating a very weird picture of life in the Soviet Union, it does not impact the enjoyment of the story by too much. Relating to this, one odd thing to note is that the country in this anime does not even seem communist. This is obviously not a bad thing in itself but it undercuts a lot of the reasons things were done they way they were in real life. Additionally, it is a wasted opportunity not to explore the ideological implications of the so called Space Race if you are going into it. It is quite rich in drama and themes.

There are only two anime in my recent memory that are set in a non-fictional setting of a communist country, and that is Schwarzesmarken and First Squad: Moment of Truth. I have not come across any other such anime. My guess is that this is because the USSR is not well received in Japan and so attempting a historically accurate anime set in the USSR is taboo, which also explains inconsistencies in this anime. Schwarzesmarken is set in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and First Squad was aimed more at a Russian audience so they went ahead. In fact, probably the only real merit to Schwarzesmarken is its attempt at a depiction of the GDR and the issues surrounding it, especially that scene where East and West Germans called each other terrorists. Most anime instead opt to allude to such events and facts by changing their names and visuals. This latter variant is the case with Youjo Senki and this anime. Such an approach also allows the writers to add things to the plot that are not historic because it is a made up plot. This is a double edged sword because the writers can add fairly ludicrous things to the plot and still claim that it is all about a made up country, even though everyone knows what the prototype for the country in the plot is meant to be. This approach is also the case with this anime.