A sharp antiutopian satire on the current situation in Russia
Russia in the year 2027. After a period of turmoil and a period of restoration, the Tsar rules once again. The country is surrounded by the Great Wall and cut off from the rest of the world. The standard of living is maintained only by oil and gas exports, and the only country with which Russia maintains friendly relations is China, which exports everything from Boeings to toilet paper. With 28 million Chinese living in Siberia, Chinese is becoming the fashionable language...
Such is the world of Sorokin's sharp antiutopian satire, which he portrays as a country returning to the dark days of Ivan the Terrible with the horror of his personal guard - the Oprichnina.
The novel offers a grandiose picture of Russia on its way back to the past. Sixteenth-century thought and language mix with modern realities, Asian despotism, corruption and cynicism are combined with modern technology and Russian nationalism. The new orphanage workers drive around in red Mercedes, decorated with a dog's head on the radiator and a broom on the trunk. As in the time of Ivan the Terrible, these symbols threaten anyone who opposes the Tsar's power with being mercilessly swept off Russian soil. Sorokin thus warns, above all, against the dangerous direction of further political development, against the tendency to isolationism and the tendency to barbarism that seems to him to be part of Russian metaphysics.
