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 church not preach faith in God, who, as we know, does not exist, but faith in communist ideals and the person of the Genialissimo.”

Kartsev's own literary works, once reviled by Soviet authorities, are now reverently “studied” in universities. The students, however, are not allowed to read Kartsev. Instead they are provided with summaries by professors who applaud the author's “progressive” critiques of an earlier, outmoded Soviet society.

Alas, a shadow looms over this utopia—that of Sim Simych Karnavalov, a hilarious caricature of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Decades earlier, the exiled writer Sim Simych, desperate to see godless communism routed from his native land, had himself “and his horse Logos, … shipped to Geneva in a frozen state and there deposited for unlimited storage in a vault in a Swiss bank.” The horse was necessary so that Sim Simych, thawed out a half century later, could ride into Moscow at the head of a conquering army and duly accept coronation as the new “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias.”

After the bloody “Simite” revolution of 2042, the new czar reestablishes “the true Russian orthodox faith” (membership obligatory), to abolish the automobile, the airplane and science in general. Emperor Sim Simych also decrees mandatory beards for all men over forty and forbids bicycling by women.

Thus it's hardly accurate to pigeonhole Voinovich—who in 1974 was himself expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and subsequently emigrated to West Germany—as an anti-communist satirist. His skewering of the stridently anti-Soviet Solzhenitsyn alone proves that.

Voinovich's target is self-righteous ideologues wherever he finds them. If the Soviet systems seems to breed such individuals, so does religious fanaticism and superpatriotism elsewhere.

“May the reality of the future not resemble the one I describe here,” says narrator Kartsev in Moscow 2042. “Of course in that event, my reputation for exceptional honesty will suffer some damage, but that I'm willing to accept. To hell with my reputation. As long as life's a little easier to live through. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole point.”