Moscow 2042
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| Author | Vladimir Voinovich |
|---|---|
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre(s) | Political, Dystopian, Satirical |
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1st ed English |
| Released | 1986 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 424 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-15-162444-5 |
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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.
[edit] 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 consider to be a masterpiece of anti-utopian satire.
[edit] Comparison to Real-World Events
The novel has been compared to the regime in North korea with its similarities in providing communism for the selected few and hunger for the masses. Striking similarities, such as the shell of an airplane stripped for parts in the main airport as well as restricted movement in the country are extremely similar to the novel according to eye-witness reports from travelers to North Korea.
In hindsight it is also said that Voinovich predicted the August Coup with his reference of the "Great August Revolution."
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