Moscow 2042
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Moscow 2042 is a 1986 novel (translated from Russian 1987) by Vladimir Voinovich. In this book, the alter ego of the author travels to the future, where he sees how communism has been built up in Moscow: at first, it seems the government has actually been successful in doing so. But slowly it becomes clear that it is not really a utopia after all.
Voinovich wrote this book a few years before the downfall of the Soviet Union. However, the possibility that Russia might still evolve into something like the nightmare of Moscow 2042 cannot be completely excluded.
Plot summary
The Russian author Kartsev, living in Munich in 1982 (just like Voinovich himself), time travels to the Moscow of 2042. After the "Great August Revolution", the new leader "Genialissimus" has changed the Soviet Union... up to a certain point. After Lenin's dream of a world revolution and Stalin's experiment of "Socialism within one country", Genialissimus has decided to build "Communism within one city", Moscow.The ideology has changed somewhat, into a hodgepodge of Marxism-Leninism and Russian Orthodoxy (Genialissimus himself is also Patriarch). The decay from which the Soviet Union suffered has worsened. The rest of the Soviet Union, where people barely survive, has been separated by a Berlin type of wall from the "paradise" of Moscow, where communism has been realised. Within the wall everyone gets everything "according to his needs". Only their needs are not decided by themselves, but by the wise Genialissimus. Most people have "ordinary needs", but a chosen few have "extraordinary needs". For the first-mentioned group, life is dismal even within the privileged "Moscow Republic". The situation finally gets so desperate that people throw themselves in the arms of a "liberator", a fellow dissident writer and (kind of) friend of Kartsev, the extreme Slavophile Sim Karnavalov (apparently inspired by Solzhenitsyn), who enters Moscow on a white horse and proclaims himself Tsar Serafim the First. Now a new kind of nightmare begins...
This novel is a masterpiece of anti-utopian satire.
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