In 1982 -- not coincidentally, just two years before the year made famous by Orwell -- Vitaly Kartsev, an exiled Soviet writer, discovers that a German travel agency is booking flights to a variety of tempting locations and, thanks to guaranteed passage through a time warp, to a variety of tantalizing years in the future. Moscow? 2042? Who could resist? And so begins Vladimir Voinovich's satiric -- and, as current events would cast it, prophetic -- tale of life in the USSr in the not-so-distant future. Kartsev's trip home turns out to be a series of outrageous escapades involving terrorists, sheiks, an American news correspondents, the KGB, the CIA, diffident keepers of the ideological flame, one wild-eye messiah, three geopolitical "rings of hostility" surrounding Moscow, and countless Soviet institutions that -- barely -- outdo those of the twentieth century in their pungent inanity.
Moscow 2042 was originally published in English in 1987, when the Berlin Wall was firmly in place and perestroika just beginning. In his new Afterword to this edition, Voinovich comments, with customary sting, on the events that inspired his novel, what has happened since publication, and the curious interplay of fiction and reality.