Moscow 2042
Moscow 2042 is a 1986 satirical novel by Vladimir Voinovich. In this book, the alter ego of the author travels to the future, where he sees how communism has been successfully built in the single city of Moscow. It soon becomes clear that the political system in the country is not a utopia and that Russia is ruled by the "Communist Party of State Security" which combines the KGB, the Communist Party, and the Russian Orthodox Church.
The party is led by former KGB general Bukashev, who had met previously with the main character of the novel in Germany. An extreme slavophile Sim Karnavalov enters Moscow on a white horse as the savior.
Voinovich wrote this book in 1982.
Plot summary
The Russian author Kartsev, living in Munich in 1982, 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.File:КПГБ.jpg|thumb|180px|CPGB – The Communist party of state security
The ideology has changed somewhat, into a hodgepodge of Marxism–Leninism and Russian Orthodoxy. 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, "From each according to his [ability, to each according to his needs|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".
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, 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.