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 referred to as "Genialissimus" has changed the Soviet Union... up to a certain point. After
Vladimir Lenin's dream of the
world revolution narrowed down to
Joseph Stalin's theory of "
Socialism in one country", Genialissimus has decided to start from building "Communism in one city", namely in Moscow. and the
KGB) The ideology has changed somewhat, into a hodgepodge of
Marxism–Leninism and
Russian Orthodoxy (the Genialissimus is also
Patriarch). The country is ruled by the
CPGB – The Communist Party of State Security, a merger of the
Communist Party and the
KGB. 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 realized. Within the wall everyone gets everything by the communist principle, "
according to his needs", though their needs are not decided by themselves, but by the 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 "Moscorep" (
Moscow
Communist
Republic). The situation finally gets so desperate that people throw themselves in the arms of the "liberator", a
dissident writer and acquaintance of Kartsev, the
slavophile Sim Karnavalov (an apparent mockery of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), who enters Moscow on a white horse and proclaims himself
Tsar Serafim the First. Thus, communism is abandoned and society digresses back into
feudal autocracy. == Reception ==