TEHRAN (IBNA) -- A dystopian satirical novel ‘Moscow 2042’ (1986) by noted Russian author ‎Vladimir Voinovich, a prophecy on the fall of the former Soviet Union has been ‎published in Persian and is available in Iranian book market.‎
The novel which is considered to be a masterpiece of its genre has been translated into Persian by Zainab Yunesi. Tehran-based Borj Publishing has released ‘Moscow 2042’ in 420 pages.
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.
The ideology has changed somewhat, into a hodgepodge of Marxism–Leninism and Russian Orthodoxy (the Genialissimus is also Patriarch). The country is ruled by CPGB – The Communist Party of State Security, a merger of the Communist Party and 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.
Vladimir Voinovich (1932-2018) was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship by Soviet authorities in 1980 but later rehabilitated and moved back to Moscow in 1990. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he continued to be an outspoken critic of Russian politics under the rule of Vladimir Putin.
was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation for 2000, for his book “Monumental propaganda” about Soviet Neo-Stalinist legacy sitting in the subconscious of almost every citizen of the “free Russia”. He also received Andrei Sakharov Prize For Writer’s Civic Courage (2002).