SOURCE: A review of Moscow 2042, in Chicago Tribune Books, May 31, 1987, Section 14, p. 7

In the following review, Nemanic outlines the plot of Moscow 2042, focusing on the characterization of the various ideologues appearing in the novel.

Satirist Vladimir Voinovich has loosed another hail of arrows at his favorite target—the Soviet mind.

Moscow 2042 describes the adventures of Vitaly Kartsev, an exiled Russian novelist who jets home a half century into the future. Upon landing, Kartsev discovers that 21st-Century Moscow has certain similarities with the Brezhnev era. Its government is run by a “senilocracy” of decrepit ideologues, presided over by a crack-brained “Genialissimo.”

But startling changes have occurred. Now hanging with the ubiquitous portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin is one of Jesus (“the first communist”). The Communist Reformed Church, replete with Saints Karl, Friedrich, Vladimir, et al., has been “granted enormous rights and powers, under only one condition—that the...