Page 108 →4 Cold War Critiques of Utopia

One of the most common and most exhaustively studied aspects of cold war literature is the prevalence of dystopian and/or anti-utopian themes. As the prefixes of both terms imply, the genres that attempt to discredit utopias have generally been perceived in opposition to their model texts, that is, utopias posit an ideal society, whereas dystopias posit a terrible society resulting from specific utopian premises. Although numerous contemporary critics¹ have explained the relationship between utopian fiction and dystopian fiction in terms that transcend such straightforward divisions, the dystopian fiction of the cold war suggests that there is still some utility in considering (though not adopting) the more simplistic definition. This value arises from two sources: (1) utopian language, and thus utopian fiction, generally contains a simple good/bad dichotomy,² and (2) the predominant public discourses of both the Soviet Union and the United States during the cold war frequently relied on such simple binary utopian sentiments. In my view the prevalence of dystopian and anti-utopian sentiment in Russian and American fiction is a parodic-satirical response intended to subvert the utopianism rampant in both superpower cultures during the cold war.³ The authors of the works examined here do not support either side in this bilaterally utopian ideological struggle but attempt to invalidate the conflict’s overarching logical context.

In The Boundaries of Genre (1981), Gary Saul Morson broadly defines “anti-utopia” as an “anti-genre” that parodies utopian thinking and classifies dystopia as a subset therein. He maintains that antigenres are distinct because the “set of conventions governing the interpretation of [anti-generic] works . . . establish a parodic relation between the anti-generic work and the works and traditions of another genre” (115). Morson’s concept of the anti-genre resembles Leon Guilhamet’s notion of generic satire as a borrower/ deformer of other forms, although Morson’s scheme sets up a more specifically contradictory relationship between a genre and its parodic foil. Morson further delineates a subclass of parodic texts as “metaparodies . . . [that] Page 109 →exploit [a] dialogue between parody and counterparody (or . . . between genre and anti-genre)” (142) in order to confound any attempts at definitive interpretation. The “meta-utopian” form “allows [the author] to entertain utopian or anti-utopian arguments, but does not ultimately commit [him or her] to them” (146). Two meta-utopian approaches that recur frequently in cold war satire are what might be termed “serial dystopia” and “systemic dystopia.” In the serial mode society is caught in a loop of equally undesirable revolutions and restorations; in the systemic mode all parties in a given ideological struggle are presented as dystopian, thereby undermining any claim of moral superiority. Such works attempt to extract social reasoning from the panoply of false binaries that result from competition between mutually exclusive utopian philosophies.

Morson also asserts that antigenres, unlike genres, “do not necessarily have exemplars—that is, acknowledged originating works—because the broader tradition of literary parody may provide models” (115). To wit, he notes that Don Quixote is an exemplary text for many anti-utopian works, despite not being an anti-utopia itself, because of its innovative use of parody (115). The models for anti-utopian literature do not even need to be literary in character since both utopian and anti-utopian scenarios can be found in historical, philosophical, political, and scientific texts: “Anti-generic motifs may also be drawn from a body of nonliterary texts, a knowledge of which is part of the competence the anti-genre presumes and encourages in its readers” (116). Several cold war anti-utopias (such as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Coover’s Public Burning, Aleshkovsky’s Hand, and Voinovich’s Moscow 2042) are predicated on the notion that distinctions between literary, historical, and political texts are tenuous and even fraudulent because of undue influence exerted upon them by governmental or other external forces.

In The Scientific World View in Dystopia (1984), Alexandra Aldridge further distinguishes utopia from dystopia in terms of their respective temporal orientations: “It should be recalled that satire is always implicit in utopian literature in the sense that the utopian state serves as a standard against which the author’s contemporaneous society can be measured. . . . If utopia has a plus sign, dystopia has a minus sign in the same area—that is, the presentation of a non-ideal outweighs the attack on contemporary trends. . . . In dystopia our fuller attention is directed to the alternative structure itself as a ‘possible impossible’ . . . future world and our lesser attention to the ongoing present; the opposite is true of utopian satire” (6). Because of this “alternative structure,” dystopian fiction tends to emphasize the ideological premises of the dystopian state. Since these premises generally stem from the author’s own time, this tendency almost inevitably returns dystopia’s focus to the present more significantly than Aldridge’s “lesser attention” indicates. The satirical thrust of utopia generally moves backward in time from the future utopian state to the present (presumably inferior) state, stopping there and Page 110 →suggesting modifications that will effect the utopian transformation, whereas dystopia satirizes by showing how much worse a future plausibly derived from the present could be. Keith Booker echoes this in The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature (1994) by stating that “dystopian societies are generally more or less thinly veiled refigurations of a situation that already exists in reality” (15). Finally I agree with David Sisk’s claim in Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias (1997) that “dystopian fiction is fundamentally concerned with the writer’s present society and builds its horrific power on extrapolating current trends to what the writer considers their logically fearsome conclusions” (Sisk 7), although I would also add the qualification that the temporal focus of dystopia is less fixed than either its utopian or anti-utopian cousins. It allows authors not only to project perceived flaws of the present into the future⁴ but also to look backward to point out the origins of dystopias that, in their view, have already arrived. Writers sympathetic to the notion that the “doomsday clock” was rapidly approaching midnight could certainly find admonitory value in either of these approaches.

Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, depicts a dystopian world in a temporal setting that actually predates the book’s publication by almost thirty years. Although the catastrophic ending moves into the present, the vast majority of the novel is set at in the final days of World War II. In this novel, as in several others from the period,⁵ the dystopia is already well underway, and it may be impossible to do anything about it except to make some small, final gesture of compassion: “There is still time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs” (760).

David M. Bethea argues in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (1989) that “the binary oppositions by which Russians have tended to define themselves from their first steps into literacy have had . . . a profound impact on the eschatological view of national history passed down through the centuries” (12).⁶ He further asserts that “none are more important than the fundamental temporal distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ and the fundamental spatial distinction between ‘east’ and ‘west’” (13). From these Bethea derives a further dualism—apocalypticists versus utopians: “The apocalypticist tends to interpret the old/new opposition by making the first element positive (the original pristine faith) and the second element negative (contemporary impiety and desecration), while the utopian tends to do the reverse, making a fetish of what is new, ‘enlightened,’ ‘advanced,’ such as technology (usually seen in Russia’s case as coming from the West), and denigrating what is old, ‘superstitious,’ and ‘ignorant,’ such as religious tradition (usually seen in Russia’s case as indigenous)” (14–15). He argues that these oppositional categories are the most powerful determinants of the social and intellectual divisions in Russian culture from the early 1600s onward.

Page 111 →Bethea uses this binary framework to interpret Soviet-era works such as Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, each of which he claims “look[s] back on [the Bolshevik Revolution] with the wisdom of disconfirming hindsight” (37), thereby taking on an anti-utopian character. Bethea contends that Platonov is “a failed utopian, not a confirmed apocalypticist . . . [who nevertheless] uses many of the same space-time symbols found in other works of apocalyptic fiction” (163). Furthermore he asserts that Platonov’s “experience as a failed utopian during the years of NEP had taught him that the use of aesthetic shape . . . to suggest that personal and national histories have coherent and meaningful beginnings, middles, and ends was dishonest” (165). To reinforce this argument, Bethea quotes Joseph Brodsky’s claim that “like no other Russian writer before or after him, Platonov was able to reveal a self-destructive, eschatological element within language itself, and that, in turn, was of extremely revealing consequence to the revolutionary eschatology with which history supplied him as his subject matter” (quoted in Bethea 165). Whether or not one agrees that Platonov was “uniquely” attuned to the nuances of Soviet rhetoric, the technique of interpreting perceived flaws in language as manifestations and/or causes of flaws in society is consistent not only in anti-utopian writing but also in subversive satire in general.

With moderate qualification Bethea’s thesis is applicable to the subversive satires that were written after Stalin’s death. Bethea describes Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Platonov as anti-utopian largely because they had lost faith that a Soviet utopia could or should be achieved, and he suggests that each reverted to a form of retrospective apocalypticism in response.⁷ I claim that the Russian satirists of the cold war era were anti-utopian (but only rarely apocalypticist)⁸ because—like Bulgakov, Platonov, and Pasternak—they decried not only the utopian language and philosophy of the Soviets but also their cynical exploitation of the deep-seated old/new, East/West, religion/technology, and faith/reason schisms. The difference for the writers who began their careers during or after the Thaw was that the dystopian character of the Soviet Union (that is, the inverted utopia, not simply the failed utopia) had already been made clear through three decades of intentional misuse of the binary foundations of Russian cultural logic. Rather than simply reversing the polarity of such binaries to their pre-Bolshevik settings, a strategy with a track record of bloody failure over centuries of Russian history, the cold war satirists instead called for a closer examination and eventual abandonment of the logic upon which such binaries are founded.

The Soviet Union was not the only superpower involved in the cold war to have utopian foundations, though, and the proliferation of anti-utopian literature in the United States from 1950 onward demonstrates the degree to which American utopianism was also being subjected to more rigorous examination. Kathryn Hume singles out the “American Dream” as the central Page 112 →utopian concept of in the post–World War II United States and attributes the rise of subversive novels in the 1960s and 1970s to a growing disillusionment: “The American Dream had promised an expansive future, and what we now find is a melancholy loss of faith in America’s exceptionalism, a sense of tarnished morality at odds with the official propaganda upholding America’s innocence and good will. . . . The more liberal writers are obsessed with America’s loss of goodness and righteousness, a claim that had stemmed from the promise of liberty and justice for all and that had always seemed to justify America’s prosperity. Many of these writers were children in the 1950s . . . and were bombarded in grade school with statements that our national fairness, honesty, prosperity, and good will made America the best nation in the world, a utopian state realized rather than something needing to be striven for” (288–89). Hume goes on to stress that this is not the first time that the American left’s utopian dreams had been shattered in the twentieth century: “Whereas political leftists from before the war gave up on utopian dreams when they rejected Stalin and communism, the later generation of liberals invested some of their utopian hopes in America. With the economic shifts of the 1970s, people all around the political compass felt their hope and faith diminish” (289). In failing to find utopia in the nominal exemplars of both Communism and capitalism, American dissidents turned their attention away from finding yet another potential utopian model and toward a general criticism of the harmful effects of centuries of utopianism on American culture.

America had, of course, been associated with a perfect (or, at least perfectible) society in a number of pre–cold war sources, both literary⁹ and non-literary. Perhaps the most influential (and longest lasting) of such associations date back such sixteenth-century Spanish explorers as Juan Ponce de León and Hernando de Soto, who searched the Americas for the “golden illusion” of El Dorado, and the neo-Calvinist Puritans, whose voyage to New England to escape persecution was frequently cast, both by themselves and by outsiders, in utopian terms. Other groups such as the Quakers (whose leader, William Penn, referred to Pennsylvania as his “Holy Experiment”), the Latter-day Saints, and the Oneida Colony contributed in smaller ways to the United States’ sense of exceptional and potentially utopian status among nations, despite the fact that most of these groups were also well outside the mainstream of American life and often ostracized. Furthermore the putative core values of the nation are delineated in documents that use rhetoric (the desire to establish a “more perfect union” in which “all men are created equal” and that is devoted to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) that is at least strongly idealistic, if not downright utopian. These various factors added up, as numerous cultural historians have demonstrated, to create a society highly inclined toward utopianism.

Page 113 →Such inclinations created fertile ground for the development and entrenchment of what would become the American cold war schema in the early years of the atomic age. The combination of postwar triumphalism, burgeoning prosperity (especially in relation to the other victorious but war-ravaged Allies), and a rampantly optimistic extant rhetoric surrounding atomic power facilitated a utopian worldview that blunted or even wholly effaced the grim realities of life in a world with nuclear weapons. Henriksen notes: “Throughout its history America has always been resistant to admitting an end to that fresh innocence first proclaimed in the Puritan vision of a shining city upon a hill. At the end of World War II Americans were especially reluctant to yield to such suspicions because their nation was tantalizingly close to realizing all the promise embodied in that vision” (9). This belief in the imminent achievement of the “American dream” was not something that arose organically from within the culture, though, but rather was in significant measure stimulated by a wide-ranging advertising campaign that fused governmental, commercial, and military¹⁰ desires. Tom Engelhardt recalls this period in his memoircum-cultural history, The End of Victory Culture (1995): “The worlds of the warrior and of abundance were, to my gaze, no more antithetical than they were to the corporate executives, university research scientists, and military officers who were using a rising military budget and the fear of communism to create a new national security economy. An alliance between big industry, big science, and the military had been forged during World War II. This alliance had blurred the boundaries between the military and civilian by fusing a double set of desires: for technological breakthroughs leading to ever more instant weapons of destruction and to ever easier living” (77). One of the strategies to offset the inherent difficulties of maintaining this alliance—the exclusivity and elitism of which run contrary to many of the values (democracy, equality, freedom) embodied in Americans’ self-image—was to appeal to a new form of atomic-powered utopianism that had been developing since the late nineteenth century.

Henry Adams’s claim that the discovery of radioactivity was an event that “wakened men” to a “fact, long since evident” (Adams 494) shrewdly frames the manner in which science, politics, and militarism can effectively collaborate in propagating an insidious utopian vision in American culture. Only a select few individuals had a practical understanding of radioactivity in 1896 or nuclear fission in 1945. Thanks both to their innate complexity and the rigorous governmental control over information deemed potentially dangerous, these concepts remained mysterious to most Americans and Russians during the cold war. Nevertheless the rippling effect of such discoveries on the culture at large was heightened by the increasing presence, direct or indirect, of science and technology in daily life, a process abetted by utopian prognostications that frequently accompanied scientific and technological developments. Page 114 →Such exceedingly rosy forecasts are generally the work of individuals or groups who stand to benefit most, deepening skepticism about the integrity of such language. Abusers of this sort range from unscrupulous purveyors of patent medicines that masquerade as “miracle drugs” to government officials intentionally underestimating and obscuring the dangers of nuclear energy and weapons testing.¹¹

As Stephen Hilgartner, Richard Bell, and Rory O’Connor point out in their Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Visions and Mindset (1982), the dawning of the atomic age was already heralded with “euphoric visions” of a “Golden Age” (2, 18) that would be produced through the use of nuclear power. They open the book with a discussion of the profound effect that the roughly contemporaneous discoveries of X-rays and radioactivity had on American culture. They report that within four months of being discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen, “X-rays had been used to test welds, to locate bullets in gunshot wounds, to set broken bones, to kill diphtheria microbes, to diagnose tuberculosis, pneumonia, and enlarged hearts and spleens and to treat cancer” (2). Furthermore they report that “by 1898, personal X-rays had become a popular status symbol in New York” and that in 1911 “experimenters at the University of Pennsylvania made plans to use X-rays to take a photograph of the human soul” (2–3). Radium enjoyed a similar wide-ranging popularity immediately after the recognition of its radioactivity. The respected scientist Sir William Ramsay was even led to speculate on radium’s importance in the New York Times, writing that the “philosopher’s stone will have been discovered, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that it may lead to that other goal of the philosophers of the Dark Age—the elixir vitae” (quoted in Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor 4).

Such grandiose language continued almost unabated for several decades, reinforcing utopian visions of nuclear energy’s transformative potential even before Enrico Fermi actually split the atom. Spencer Weart claims that “[by the 1930s] it was a cliché that atomic energy might bring someday bring about an industrial revolution, a golden age of plenty” and that any corollary fear of atomic weapons was neutralized by the belief that their massive power would mean that “the human race would have to foreswear war” (“Heyday” 85). An article by physicist R. W. Langer in the July 6, 1940, edition¹² of Collier’s demonstrates both of these lines of argumentation:

[There will be] unparalleled richness and opportunities for all. Privilege and class distinctions and the other sources of social uneasiness and bitterness will become relics because things that make up the good life will be so abundant and inexpensive. War itself will become obsolete because of the disappearance of those economic stresses that immemorially have caused it. Industrious, powerful nations and clever, aggressive races can win at peace far more than could ever be won at war. . . .  Page 115 →This is not visionary. The foundations of the happy era have already been laid. The driving force is within our grasp. Reality is about to be handed from the scientists in their laboratories to the engineers in their factories for application to your daily life. It is a new form of power—atomic power. (quoted in Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor 18)

Langer’s words echo Weart’s contention that what he calls the “heyday of myth and cliché” underpinned Americans’ conviction that “the atomic golden age would enjoy not only prosperity but peace” (“Heyday” 85). After the war this utopian belief served not only to soften the potential psychic guilt of using the bomb but also to prepare the way for acceptance of grotesques like Mutual Assured Destruction: “Atomic bombs themselves mightily strengthened the old idea that nuclear energy could solve every social problem, including war. . . . In mid-1945 most people had expected the fighting to go on for many more bloody months, and now atomic bombs seemed to have forestalled that as if by a stroke of magic” (87).

The central theme of Nukespeak is the revelation, still generally unacknowledged at the time of the book’s publication, that the linguistic gyrations required to “sell” atomic power and the atomic bomb had a notably Orwellian effect on American culture:

In Nukespeak, atrocities are rendered invisible by sterile words like megadeaths; nuclear war is called a nuclear exchange. Nuclear weapons accidents are called broken arrows and bent spears. . . .

Nukespeak is the language of the nuclear mindset—the world view, or system of beliefs—of nuclear developers. . . . A mindset acts like a filter, sorting information and perceptions, allowing it to be processed and some to be ignored, consciously or unconsciously. Nukespeak encodes the beliefs and assumptions of the nuclear mindset; the language and the mindset continuously reinforce each other. (xiii)

The authors connect this new language and mindset—a concept whose function is described in terms similar to Hirshberg’s cognitive schemata—directly to “euphoric visions of nuclear technologies” stemming from the discovery of X-rays and radium as well as the achievement of nuclear fission in 1938 (xiii–xiv). The barrage of official propaganda extolling the virtues of “the sunny side of the atom” (xiv), taken to the seemingly absurd length of measuring fallout in “Sunshine Units” (219), created an atmosphere in which those in power use language to distort reality in their favor.

The efficacy of such strategies is readily demonstrable, not just anecdotally but also empirically: “In October 1957 the National Association of Science Writers commissioned the first major postwar survey of U.S. public views of science. . . . The survey revealed a nearly spiritual reverence for science and technology. Nearly 90 percent of those polled agreed that the world was Page 116 →‘better off because of science’—for its contributions to medicine, to rapidly rising living standards, to American economic dominance, and for winning the Second World War. . . . Only 12 years after atom bombs vaporized Japanese cities, during an increasingly frenetic nuclear arms race, 90 percent of the sample could not name a single negative consequence of science” (Piller 5). In their The Genocidal Mentality (1990), Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen suggest that such forms of “reverence” result from intentional and often obfuscating processes. They describe in detail the officially sanctioned efforts to create “nuclear normality,” which they describe as “a generally perceived obligation to view [nuclear] weapons in certain ways because it is morally right, politically necessary, and personally mature to do so.” Furthermore they note that the rationale for such an obligation is not solely the result of experts’ honest explanation; it is “also influenced by the fear, mystery, and technological claims surrounding the weapons.” As the survey results above illustrate, “nuclear normality . . . becomes a cultural assumption, partly manipulated and at times so urgently put forward and embraced as to obscure the bizarre ideological and psychological assumptions contained in it” (38).

Cold war satire does not limit itself to criticizing deformation of language in the service of absurdity or corrupt power, however; it also casts aspersion on cultural forces that allowed “nuclear normality” to occur in the first place. Margot Henriksen discusses this theme as part of a broader cultural movement in Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (1997): “In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis a more radical and diverse rebellion grew in response to the menace of American power and to the menace of an American system that had absorbed the debased values associated with the bomb and the cold war. . . . The revolt expanded to encompass a broad range of issues that mirrored the larger concerns raised in the civil defense debate: the morality and sanity of America, the reliability and responsibility of the government, the fear of extinction and extermination, the quest for peace and a new society, with a regenerated sense of human history and of community and individual ethics” (241). With only marginal qualification, these same characteristics can be ascribed to many of the Russian satirists who used their ideologically unacceptable fictions to defy the Soviet state in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The Russian “sense of human history[,] . . . community and individual ethics” was understandably less “regenerated” than that of their American counterparts, having undergone not only the cultural stresses of the cold war, but also of World War II, the Stalinist “great terror,” and the Russian Revolution and Civil War before that. Weart notes that “total war was an abstraction to most Americans, but most Russian families had personal memories of a wretched life amid rubble at some point during the years between 1914 and 1945, and the memories were kept alive by a ceaseless barrage of patriotic films, stories and ceremonies” (240). If anything, Russian writers were much more personally familiar with violence in the Page 117 →defense of “debased values,” whether an actual defense, as in World War II, or a putative one, as in the purges of 1937 and 1938. Therefore they reacted against these values with greater skepticism.

Resulting partly from the rise of a dissenting subculture, a great number of cold war satires view the world from a distinctly anti-utopian and/or dystopian perspective. Drawing primarily on Zamyatin’s We (1924), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), these works argue that the destructive political climate of the cold war grew from bogus utopian promises gone astray. Unlike their predecessors, however, most of these later works do not focus primarily on one aspect of utopianism in the way that Orwell condemns totalitarianism or Zamyatin and Huxley criticize the technologization (and concurrent dehumanization) of society. Taking the dichotomous paradigm of the cold war as their model, the cold war subversive satirists instead present as inherently flawed any competition between social models containing utopian premises. They argue that such situations inevitably lead not to progress but to one dystopian society succeeding another.

Although arguably more prevalent after the nuclear showdown in Cuba, serialized and systemic dystopias are not unique to the late cold war era. Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano (1952), published only three years after Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, starts out resembling an archetypal dystopia but ends up blurring the line between the proponents and opponents of the status quo. Likewise, many novels written between the world wars showed the deleterious effects of competing dystopian systems. Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) presented a society in which the actions of rabid American anti-Communists (perhaps) inadvertently mirror those of their ostensible adversaries. Booker writes that “Lewis shows these anti-Stalinist zealots employing brutal methods that are virtually indistinguishable from those used by Stalin himself” (98). Lewis’s earlier novel Babbitt (1922) also evokes such a seesawing dystopian attitude in focusing on the life of George Babbitt, a sort of middle-class American everyman. Lewis shows the grave errors his protagonist makes in replacing the utopian boosterist ideals of “Zenith the Zip City—Zeal, Zest, and Zowie” (133) first with the hedonism espoused by Tanis Judique’s circle and then with the reactionary fervor of the “Good Citizens’ League” (290, passim). James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen (1919), a novel extensively informed by Russian folkloric traditions, reads in part as a satire on the ineffectuality of each of the idealistic systems in which its protagonist takes part. All of the social structures Jurgen encounters during his yearlong Wednesday—the chivalric feudalism of Camelard, the carefree eroticism of Cockaigne, the romanticism of Leukê, the totalitarianism of Philistia, or the patriotic traditionalism of Noumaria—prove ultimately to be less desirable than the somewhat pedestrian reality of his life in Poictesme.

In additional to these potential literary precursors, nonliterary models of all kinds (that is, “social fictions” of the sort Iser discusses) were also plentiful Page 118 →after World War II, as the cold war itself inverted the promise of a better world that was a conceivable, and publicly projected, result of the defeat of global fascism in 1945. The United Nations, an organization with a distinctly utopian albeit noble mandate,¹³ was rendered largely powerless for much of the cold war era because of the tension between the two superpowers that was deemed strategically necessary to avoid global destruction. Furthermore, given the high-mindedness (and the correspondingly high-flown rhetoric) upon which both were founded, the United States and the Soviet Union in their cold war manifestations are both at least partially dystopian societies.¹⁴ I base this contention on the simple premise that any society whose survival or supremacy is predicated on the destruction of its enemy in a time when such destruction inevitably leads to total mutual annihilation is dystopian by the very nature of its self-negating illogic.

In light of such a cultural context, Henriksen asserts a redemptive function for novels such as Catch-22 that “attack the internal security bureaucracy and its various by-products, like informing and loyalty-oaths” (242). She contends that these works are ultimately intended to point out how American culture had deviated from its original idealistic path even as it continued to invoke it: “At a point near the end of the novel Milo lectures Yossarian on the dangers of his rebellion against the system: ‘Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by exercising them.’ Daring to exercise these rights—thus the right of dissent—fed into the moral and ethical code of the 1960s and it was the fictional Yossarian’s kind of example that illustrated the possibilities of opposition and alternative states of mind” (256). Henriksen maintains that Heller is constructing a radically contradictory, subversive means of interpreting historical events by calling attention to the patent absurdity of statements like Milo’s. This new perspective might avert a terrible future like that Yossarian glimpses during his Dante-esque journey through Rome in the later stages of the novel, because it reinstates human individuality (and mortality) in a position of invariable and primary importance: “It was possible by the early sixties to exercise imagination and the right to dissent, to see a different version of history, a version that transformed cold war rationality into all-encompassing malignant American arrogance. Heller’s anti-heroic and darkly humorous reinterpretation of World War II and its legacies promoted an appreciation both for this acknowledgment of American arrogance and for the necessity of eluding and renouncing the dangerous future that such arrogance promised. A more human and moral vision of the meaning of life and history in the atomic age appeared: Page 119 →Man is perishable matter” (256). Western critics regularly attributed this kind of positive countercultural influence to anti-Soviet Russian authors (often misinterpreting “anti-Soviet” as “pro-Western” in the process), but it is equally applicable to many American satirists from Heller onward.

Although it is only sporadically identified as a dystopian novel, Catch-22 became the prime cold war exemplar of an ostensibly utopian order leading instead to dystopian chaos. The destructive repercussions of such an inversion are more pervasive, more irrational, and more complete in Catch-22 than in Jurgen, Babbitt, or Player Piano. Milo Minderbinder’s hypercapitalist syndicate, which will drop bombs on or for anyone for a price, regardless of political affiliation (except, ironically, the Soviets, who do not respect his value system), is no improvement over the demonstrably inept and dangerously stupid bureaucratic power structure of the military, especially for those who cannot afford Milo’s prices. He even goes so far as to bomb his brothers-in-arms with their own planes (and presumably their own munitions). When this act results in a simultaneous upsurge of business and expression of outrage, Milo feels compelled to clarify his new profit-oriented reasoning: “‘In a democracy, the government is the people,’ Milo explained. ‘We’re the people, aren’t we? So we might as well just keep the money and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. If we pay the government everything we owe it, we’ll only be encouraging government control and discouraging other individuals from bombing their own men and planes. We’ll be taking away their incentive’” (254).

By looking back at World War II with the hindsight of eighteen years’ experience, Heller retroactively lays bare the ways early 1960s American society, dominated by a milder form of the capitalism that Milo represents, was already well on its way to becoming a dystopia. In American Fictions, 1940–1980, Frederick Karl refers to Milo as “our [the United States’s] own I. G. Farben, the element that holds everything together and, at the same time, makes war desirable” (311). This reference helps link Catch-22 to Gravity’s Rainbow, another novel that looks backward in time for the sources of negative, potentially dystopian conditions in the present. Heller himself made the associative symbolic meaning of Catch-22 clear in an interview more than a decade after the novel was published: “I wrote it during the Korean War and aimed it for the one after that. . . . The Cold War is what I was truly talking about” (quoted in Weart, Nuclear 395).

Catch-22 combines the darkly comic satire of Lewis and Vonnegut with the grim inevitability of a dystopian society’s victory over the individual found in We or Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Weisenburger writes, “Catch-22 is . . . quite clearly satirical in fulfilling [the] intent to mime the degeneration of a human culture absurdly devoted to everything nonhuman, mechanical, dead” (173). Heller’s technique accomplishes Weisenburger’s goal for subversive satire, Page 120 →“to pull off the vest shielding us in convention and conformity, so to reveal the deadly chaos underneath” (172); it also makes the dystopian nature of the world he describes apparent. Everything that Yossarian believes should create a positive effect instead results in a negative one, and vice versa. Heller creates a Chinese finger-trap-like world in which Yossarian’s rational attempts to overcome the irrational adversities around him only aggravate his situation. Not only is the one-eyed man not king in this land of the blind, it seems everyone is out to deprive him of his last eye. The insanity of this situation is encapsulated in the paradox for which the book is named and against which Yossarian ultimately rebels: “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle” (Heller 46). Almost every action in the novel triggers an irrational reaction, a situation that renders cause and effect largely meaningless and creates a paradoxical and increasingly lethal world from which escape is nearly impossible.

The kind of circular logic contained in this explanation of Catch-22 permeates the whole novel, from Milo’s validation of his actions to the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade, in which Captain Black attempts to demonize Major Major, a rival officer who has received an appointment that Black coveted, through simplistic anti-Communist logic: “When fellow administrative officers expressed astonishment at Colonel Cathcart’s choice of Major Major, Captain Black muttered that there was something funny going on; when they speculated on the political value of Major Major’s resemblance to Henry Fonda, Captain Black asserted that Major Major really was Henry Fonda; and when they remarked that Major Major was somewhat odd, Captain Black announced that he was a Communist” (111). Captain Black begins a practice of requiring loyalty oaths with the intention of producing evidence of Major Major’s Communist sympathies. His system is rigged to ensure that Major Major cannot possibly defend himself: “‘From now on, I’m going to make every son of a bitch who comes to my intelligence tent sign a loyalty oath. And I’m not going to let that bastard Major Major sign one even if he wants to” (111).

As in Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, Captain Black’s self-righteous invocation of patriotism touches off a wave of hyperpatriotism in which various officers on the base attempt to outdo each other in expressions of devotion to the United States. Captain Black even has one of his aides “sign hundreds of [loyalty oaths] with [Captain Black’s] name each day so that he could Page 121 →always prove he was more loyal than anyone else” (112). Captain Black even admits the meaninglessness of this gesture, saying, “The important thing is to keep them pledging. . . . It doesn’t matter if they mean it or not. That’s why they make little kids pledge allegiance before they know what ‘pledge’ and ‘allegiance’ mean” (112). Heller’s satire condemns conspicuous, routinized patriotism as empty rhetoric, a stance that destabilizes the validity of both its practitioners and its message. As Peter G. Jones notes in War and the Novelist, the military system of Catch-22 “is no respecter of persons; its machine-logic takes words only at face-value” (49–50). Thus it serves as a paradigm of Maltby’s “conceptually impoverished discourses that impede critical reflection” (30). Throughout the course of the novel, Heller exposes several varieties of such semantically “dead” language, thereby revealing that the “probability of death and an insane bureaucratic and moral corruption were the true legacies and meaning of World War II” (Henriksen 247). As such Catch-22 merits a dystopian designation, since the conventional cultural wisdom of the United States regarding World War II posited a society rescued from (rather than afflicted with) characteristics such as death, insanity, and corruption that could be readily associated—through the use of social fictions like Hirshberg’s patriotic schema—with the enemy.

Catch-22 thus marks a distinct shift in tone that remains fairly consistent in later cold war satire. Criticism of the irrational and innately dangerous nature of the status quo—interpreted in political, literary, scientific, historical, and mythological terms—shows up frequently in both American and Russian literature, most often in works that borrow heavily from both science fiction and dystopian conventions.¹⁵

Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is one of the most prominent American examples of dystopian cold war satire, in part because its author managed to bridge the gap between “popular” and “literary” fiction in conveying his “urgent sense of history speeding toward an end” (Dewey 55). Published less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cat’s Cradle presents a gloomy vision of humanity’s near future if it continues its unchecked faith in the progressive capabilities of science. As Max F. Schulz writes, “Cat’s Cradle is a novel about the varieties of truth available to man” (57) that simultaneously argues against reliance on any one of them, especially those that most ardently stake a claim to veracity.

Vonnegut explicitly associates the end of the world with the atomic bomb, even though it is a hybrid water molecule called “ice-nine” rather than nuclear war that causes its ultimate demise. Dr. Felix Hoenniker, the inventor of ice-nine, is introduced by John/Jonah, Vonnegut’s authorial stand-in, as one of the so-called Fathers of the first atomic bomb. In a letter to Jonah, who is conducting research on a book about the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Hoenniker’s son Newt says that “people couldn’t get to him because he just wasn’t interested in people” (13–14). He also relates Hoenniker’s Page 122 →reaction to witnessing the Trinity test at Alamogordo, New Mexico: “After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said ‘What is sin?’” (17). Hoenniker’s attitude parodies several of Oppenheimer’s self-critical comments in the immediate aftermath of the bomb’s development and use.¹⁶ It also demonstrates how Hoenniker’s simultaneous lack of reflection and foresight, coupled with his lack of interest in humanity, makes him a dangerous figure. Rather than being a “harmless and gentle and dreamy” (67) innocent who simply exists on a different intellectual plane than most people, Hoenniker becomes a symbolic analogue for the nation, and perhaps mankind as a whole. Vonnegut’s satire exposes Hoenniker’s innocence as willful ignorance of the consequences of his actions, a trait that ultimately results in the eradication of all life on earth. As Marvin Breed, the brother of Hoenniker’s former employer, rhetorically asks Jonah, “How the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb?” (68).

In undermining Hoenniker’s innocence, Vonnegut draws on the March 1948 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which Oppenheimer asserts that “the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose” (66), a position that resulted in part from his reflection on the idealism that accompanied a prior development in the science of explosives: “When it went off . . . that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel, and his hope, his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to all wars” (quoted in Henriksen 6). In the opinion of many historians, the atomic bomb helped speed the end of World War II and thus saved many times more lives than it took at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless it also precipitated the cold war and unleashed the kind of grave anxieties that Vonnegut must have felt quite keenly in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear showdown in Cuba. Far from achieving the utopian goal of ending all wars peacefully, an aim echoed in Langer’s rosy predictions for the atomic age, in 1963 nuclear weapons seemed much more likely (in the popular imagination, if not necessarily that of statesmen) to end all wars by ending all human life. Henriksen argues that Hoenniker’s indifferent attitude toward his scientific creation, both the bomb and ice-nine, “represent[s] the depraved nexus of scientific and military values . . . [and] suggests the general qualities needed for the promotion of Armageddon” (310). More important, Vonnegut’s use of Hoenniker’s comment as near-verbatim satirical foil for Oppenheimer’s postwar attitude implies that the disastrous outcome of Cat’s Cradle is what awaits a world that adopts Hoenniker’s blissful moral ignorance instead of Oppenheimer’s more repentant reflection.¹⁷

Ice-nine’s creation, like that of the atomic bomb, stemmed from extensively intermingled military and commercial concerns.¹⁸ Hoenniker develops ice-nine in response to a request by a Marine general who “felt that one of Page 123 →the aspects of progress should be that Marines no longer had to fight in mud” (42–43). Having stumbled on the secret of how to make the water crystals lock by observing a large chemical manufacturing operation, Hoenniker devises his substance in the secrecy of the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company,¹⁹ an institution that Newt explains was co-opted at Hoenniker’s insistence for governmental military research during the Manhattan Project. Hoenniker’s military research is classified (as was automatically the case with any such work), and his research for the company would presumably have been confidential in order to conceal any potentially profitable company secrets. It is this secrecy that allows Hoenniker to create the single chip of ice-nine without “anyone’s realizing what he was doing [or] leaving records of what he’d done” (50). Hoenniker creates what is essentially a Doomsday Machine every bit as powerful as that in Dr. Strangelove, and like the device in Kubrick’s film, ice-nine causes the accidental end of the world in part because its existence was a secret.

Hoenniker’s astonishingly irresponsible offspring are responsible for the actual dissemination of ice-nine, although it is Hoenniker’s lack of care with his dangerous discovery that allows them to blunder into apocalypse. Hoenniker takes the glass vial containing the fateful chip with him on the family’s Christmas vacation to Cape Cod and goes about “teasing his children with hints about ice-nine, showing it to them in a little bottle on whose label he had drawn a skull and crossbones, and written: ‘Danger! Ice-nine! Keep away from moisture!’” (247). While his children are out playing on the beach with a dog on Christmas Eve, Hoenniker “play[s] puddly games in the kitchen with water and pots and pans and ice-nine” (247), during which he takes a break and dies unexplainedly, leaving a saucepan full of ice-nine behind. The children return and accidentally freeze their dog solid while cleaning up the water in the kitchen, after which they discover that their father has died. The three Hoenniker children make three chips out of the ice-nine remaining in the saucepan, place the chips into individual thermos bottles, and take possession of one each. As Henriksen points out, each of the Hoenniker children eventually abuses his or her terrible inheritance, in the process bringing it into some aspect of cold war geopolitics: “Angela bought her husband with it, and his secret government research for America was based on ice-nine; Newt had enticed an Eastern-bloc dancer with his ice-nine, and when she deserted him, she took the ice-nine secret to the Soviet sphere of influence; and Frank had gained his position of power in San Lorenzo through his knowledge of science and ice-nine. Given this cold war scenario, it seems just a matter of time before catastrophe strikes” (314).

Vonnegut suggests that the irresponsibly cavalier and capitalistic attitude of the Hoenniker children toward the ice-nine is quintessentially American by including characters such as Dr. Asa Breed, Hoenniker’s boss at the Research Laboratory, or bicycle manufacturer H. Lowe Crosby. Breed proudly Page 124 →claims that “new knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth” (Vonnegut, Cat’s 41) but is ironically ignorant of Hoenniker’s success in creating ice-nine. Crosby is an ardent patriot who is nevertheless moving his factory (at Frank Hoenniker’s invitation) to the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo from Chicago, complaining that his business has suffered in the United States because the “eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy” (89). With few exceptions Vonnegut’s Americans are individuals willfully incapable of either foresight or dealing with contradictions. They inevitably fall back on the easy answers of a granfalloon such as patriotism, positivism, or capitalism, a condition that renders them blind to the dangers in their midst. Even Horlick Minton, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to San Lorenzo, who gives a decidedly humanistic (“Never mind with countries. Think of people.” [256]) speech just before the onset of the ice-nine apocalypse, seems resigned to the dreary, suicidal fate of the world.

Predictably the catastrophe that Henriksen forecasts does strike once Jonah and all the Hoenniker children gather on San Lorenzo for Frank’s installation as leader. Frank purchased his status as successor to “Papa” Monzano, the island’s ruthless military dictator, by giving him his chip of ice-nine, which Monzano uses dramatically to commit suicide on his deathbed. After a string of calamitous blunders, similar to the unlikely but plausible circumstances leading to an accidental nuclear attack in Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove, Monzano’s frozen body ends up plummeting into the sea, setting off a chain reaction that irrevocably freezes all the water on earth. Jonah and a few others survive for several months, an interval during which Jonah composes the book (titled The Day the World Ended) the reader is ostensibly paging through. The seeming inevitability of this destruction is what makes Cat’s Cradle dystopian. In some ways repeating the story of the Fall, humanity again loses its place in the world by acquiring and using knowledge for whose moral / ethical dimensions it neither is, nor was intended to be, prepared.²⁰ Far from living up to Breed’s utopian assertion that “new knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth,” it actually proves to be least valuable, since it causes the end of the world. Cat’s Cradle upends the idealistic, and perhaps naive, hopes of scientists such as Nobel and Oppenheimer through a fictional invention that recalls their own destructive offspring. Ostensible enlightenment has resulted in eternal darkening of the world’s skies, and Vonnegut’s dystopia closes without much hope that humanity on its current course will survive much longer.

Although R. W. Langer’s forecast in Collier’s was intended specifically for an American audience, many of the rhetorical elements of his vast atomic utopia are just as readily found in Soviet propaganda about the egalitarian state that would exist once true Communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat had been achieved. Zinoviev, Aksyonov, and Voinovich (among others) show how the collective consciousness of both groups and individuals can be Page 125 →swayed by a language/mindset cycle of reinforcement that functions much like Nukespeak did in the United States. Sinyavsky writes in Soviet Civilization that the utopianism of the Soviet Union (and, to some extent, utopianism in general) was predicated on an inherent contradiction: “This utopia is in an ambiguous situation vis-à-vis the world (in space) and history (in time). On the one hand, it proposes itself and imposes itself on the rest of humanity, as if with open arms, beckoning it into the great, victorious idea. On the other hand, it divorces itself in every possible way from the outside world as from an alien and dangerous environment. The idea of capitalist encirclement, even if no such thing exists any longer, plays the part of the sea to this island utopia. . . . Extreme expansionism goes hand-in-hand with extreme isolationism. Given the nature of this ideal State or the victorious idea, this is understandable. For real-life utopia conceives of itself as a universal system and doctrine; at the same time, it is singular and will brook no other idea” (28). The cognitive dissonance engendered by constant exaltation of this “universal system” within a politically xenophobic and rhetorically monological society provides the impetus for a number of exemplary cold war satires, including two that explicitly literalize Sinyavsky’s metaphor of an encircled island.

Picking up where his debut left off, Zinoviev’s Radiant Future sets its sights directly on exposing fatal flaws in the “great, victorious idea” being imposed upon the Soviet citizenry. Whereas The Yawning Heights achieved its satire mostly by parodically impersonating various forms of Soviet propagandistic language, The Radiant Future ironically deflates such language by demonstrating the glaring disparity between its idealism and the actual situation it purports to describe. The phrase svetloe budushchee (radiant future) is a cliché lifted intact from official Soviet language, and Sinyavsky demonstrates its role in Soviet historical dogmatism by sardonically outlining the potentially pejorative meaning of “utopia”: “Utopians only fantasize about the radiant future, having no idea how to get there in fact, whereas we [Soviets] already know and are getting there” (Soviet Civilization 29). Laying the foundation for his critiques in The Radiant Future, Zinoviev echoes and simultaeously subverts such a view of utopianism through the character of Chatterer in The Yawning Heights. When told by the morally ambiguous²¹ character of Brother that Ibansk is “developing towards utopia” and “putting forward radiant ideals towards which men aspire in one way or another,” Chatterer derides Brother’s naïveté by noting that utopia requires deliberate misperception: “What is utopia? . . . It is an abstraction based on a given reality. Utopia is built in the following way. You take the positive and negative aspects of this reality. The positive aspects are either implicitly admitted or deliberately exaggerated. The negative aspects are erased. . . . If you try to construct a utopia which offers us radiant ideals, you will arrive at Ibanskian society but without careerists, informers, parasites, and so on. All the inventors Page 126 →of utopias make the same mistake. They ignore the fact that both the positive and negative aspects of reality which play their part in the formation of a utopia are both engendered by the same society” (531–32). Chatterer goes on to say that “only one kind of utopia can produce radiant ideals . . . a degenerate form of utopia consisting of a multitude of the negative aspects of our reality” (532). The Radiant Future is precisely such a “degenerate” utopia, one that deflates the “sense of superiority” that saturates Soviet notions of emergent Communist society.

The Radiant Future announces its satirical intent on the first page with a literally decrepit and decaying “permanent slogan” (statsionarnyi lozung), a large metallic piece of propagandistic public art bearing the phrase “Long Live Communism—The Radiant Future of All Mankind!” (7). The public disregards “the Slogan” except to adorn it with vulgar graffiti. The government refurbishes the slogan at least three times a year, all of which are occasions for propagandizing Communism: “once for the May-day celebrations, once for the November celebrations, and on every occasion when Moscow entered for the All-Union contest for the model Communist city, and the multimillion army of Moscow office workers was driven out onto the streets to clean up the rubbish” (7). Nevertheless, despite the fact that a “huge amount of money was poured into it—no less (it is rumored) than was invested in the whole of our agriculture during the first five-year plan,” the slogan is so poorly constructed that this maintenance costs “several times more than its initial construction” (7). Given that the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32) was marked mostly by massive expenditures on industry rather than agriculture and that the most noteworthy agricultural policies of the period—the collectivization and elimination of the kulaks—contributed to a major famine in 1932–33, Zinoviev’s reference here manages to damn both the alleged grandiosity of the Slogan’s expense and a key moment Soviet history with one instance of faint praise.

Much like The Yawning Heights, the bulk of The Radiant Future consists of conversations among characters belonging to the intelligentsia. Chief among these characters is the novel’s unnamed protagonist/narrator, who introduces himself: “I’m the Head of the Department of Theoretical Problems of the Methodology of Scientific Communism. . . . I am a doctor of philosophy, a professor, a member of the editorial board of our leading philosophical journal, a member of countless Scientific councils, committees, commissions, societies, the author of six monographs and a hundred articles” (10–11). In short he is utterly embedded within the ideological and social structure of the state via his position as an approved commentator on and producer of official Soviet language. By reifying such language in the form of the Slogan and then demonstrating the thorough debasement of this corporeal symbol, Zinoviev undercuts both the myths of Soviet society and the means by which they are transmitted and perpetuated. A simultaneous albeit less literal Page 127 →process of revelation, triggered in large measure by his dissident friend Anton, who is struggling to publish a book that gives “an objective description of communism as it really is” (286), takes place within the narrator as he comes to recognize the hollowness and corruption of the ideas he has propagated through his position.²² The Slogan acts as a linguistic Potemkin village in that it attempts to disguise an unpleasant reality with an idealized façade.

The Slogan is renovated with great pomp and circumstance in honor of the Twenty-fifth Party Congress, with new materials that had, in a cliché of Soviet propaganda, been “saved up by the construction workers of Moscow in honor of the coming Congress” (8). This ostensible thrift saves the builders of the slogan ten million rubles, which they in turn spend on “permanent reinforced concrete frames to carry the portraits of the members of the Politburo, thus putting the crowning glory (as the newspapers said) to the splendid architectural ensemble of Cosmonaut Square and the wasteground adjoining it” (8). Thus materials presumably diverted from other, potentially necessary construction projects are diverted for a self-aggrandizing monument that also serves, as its architect argues, “to conceal the ugliness of the wasteground from the eyes of the foreigners [visiting the city for the Congress]” (8). So in every aspect the Slogan embodies for Zinoviev a Soviet rhetoric whose dual purposes are the obscuration of one undesirable reality (the wasteground in the middle of the city “where the Avenue of Marxism-Leninism meets Cosmonaut Square”) and ostentatious superimposition of another (the “glory” of the Politburo).

As might be expected, the refurbished Slogan becomes almost immediately a “seat of debauchery twenty-four hours a day.” Initially there is some official indignation to this development and a group of Komsomol “vigilantes” is dispatched “with great enthusiasm” to prevent its further desecration. This effort soon fails because “those who stood guard duty were students and junior research assistants who, on account of their youth, were inclined to drunkenness. And since the Slogan was close to the ‘Youth’ café and a supermarket with a well-stocked wine and spirits department, the vigilantes didn’t waste their time.” The students eventually get so drunk that they accost passersby and all but one are “carted off to the cooler,” the exception being “a lad who had fallen into the gap between two letters and was not discovered.” The Komsomol institutes a “considerable education program” following these events, but it consists solely of a senior member teaching his younger charges “how to hold [their] liquor” more effectively (45–46). Within weeks, the Slogan ironically seems “destined to become a kind of international salon” that represents everything but the superiority of Communism: “The spaces between the letters proved to be very convenient places for the trysts of the lovelorn young. That was on the side reading ‘Long Live Communism.’ The other side (‘The Radiant Future of All Mankind’) which was closer to the ‘Youth’ café and the wine shop, provided a home for the drinking bouts of the local Page 128 →alcoholics. . . . Next, a particular sort of young woman began to frequent the area around the Slogan. The word ‘Radiant’ became a center for drug-trafficking. And the word ‘Communism’ was soon taken over completely by homosexuals” (58–59). Party cadres attempt to solve this problem by destroying several buildings (including a fifteenth-century church) to facilitate the transformation of “the Avenue of the Construction Workers into a route for government use only (it led directly to the suburban palaces of the highest leadership)” (93). The street is named after the workers who ostensibly donated time and materials to refurbish the Slogan, but these very workers would be prohibited from using the street commemorating their contributions. This irony proves largely irrelevant because the heedless nature of the construction work causes the Slogan to be buried beneath a heap of rubble from the demolished buildings, during which time “everyone [except for some “pensioners” who complain to the newspapers] forgot about it” (93). The Slogan is eventually exhumed but becomes “very difficult to get to,” causing the “morally unstable elements of society” to gather elsewhere and giving “citizens and visitors . . . the opportunity to admire the marvelous spectacle of the Slogan,” which they predictably do not do (93).

As Cosmonaut Square is reconstructed (again) in preparation for the Party Congress, the Slogan becomes “a place to be shown off to foreigners” when its letters are recast in titanium instead of stainless steel, which had “first of all turned black and then come out in brown blotches.” Zinoviev satirizes the false and crude construction of Soviet rhetoric when his narrator suggests that “someone had made a nice little profit for himself by supplying ordinary cast iron instead of the intended stainless steel” (144). The new glory of the Slogan is short lived, though, because “some scrounger from the Ministry of Foreign Trade . . . had decided to cover the roof of his three-(!!)story villa (with its own swimming pool!!) in nothing less than titanium” and had “hired some crooks, who for a healthy fee delivered the first three letters of the slogan (‘LON’) to his villa” (181). Like the seizure of the Avenue of the Construction Workers, the cadres have cannibalized another monument to the proletariat and again no one notices until “one age-old pensioner . . . had taken his great-great-great-granddaughter for a walk and noticed that something was not quite right.” He recalls “stroll[ing] around this square with Ilyich [Lenin?]” but only knows that “something sort of communist” is missing. An investigation is mounted and allegedly resolves when cosmonauts spot the “gleaming roof of the villain’s villa” from space, thus also conveniently providing “incontrovertible proof of the practical value of space flight” for the regime. Unfortunately a lack of titanium mandates that the missing letters be replaced with wooden planks painted gray, which the narrator laments “wasn’t quite the same” (182).

Immediately after recalling a conversation in which Anton insists that “the slogan ‘Live for a Radiant Future’ is nothing but a badly camouflaged Page 129 →demand to live with an eye on the privileges of the topmost ranks of society” (224), a claim repeatedly demonstrated by the physical Slogan’s treatment to that point, the narrator decides to walk past the Slogan on a beautiful spring day to reinforce his faith that “life is good even in our radiant communist society.” There he finds that the statue of Lenin erected next to the Slogan lost an eye lost an eye, changing his expression from one of “arch joviality” into one of “sheer ill temper,” while the Slogan itself is in terrible disrepair: “Some of the letters of the Slogan had disappeared altogether to some unknown destination. Others had fallen down, and the rest had been so bespattered by the pigeons that not even mathematical linguists could decipher them” (225–26). He hails a taxi home with a driver who curses “the idiots who cluttered up the road with all this rubbish [the Slogan],” and eventually the narrator joins him in “attack[ing] our way of life in chorus and with redoubled strength” (226). His disillusionment is nearly complete and, not surprisingly, he soon finds himself marginalized from the corridors of power than he had previously inhabited. He ends up in “a miserable little faculty” but retains mild hope that he “will be able to turn it into something decent” (286). As the book ends, he is walking past the Slogan and notes that it is covered in scaffolding awaiting yet another renovation. He ruefully laments that this event will be hailed in the usual ways by his old institute, rhetorically asking, “When will someone decide to get rid of all these idiots and replace them with some worthwhile people?” His final thought still asserts that “we will build communism,” but the book’s final line echoes Gogol’s famous question to Russia in Dead Souls, as he is not even sure where he is headed in the final line of the book, much less where his country will go. He worries that “passers-by would look at [him] and laugh” (287), but like the Slogan he is largely ignored and left to head into his ambiguous, decidedly nonutopian (although not necessarily dystopian) future.

Like his character Anton, Zinoviev is no adherent of a simple anti-Communism in his critiques of the absurdity of the Soviet system. Zinoviev finds the idealistic official language of the Soviet Union, whether verbalized, published, or monumentalized, to be an empty and absurd cipher, regardless of its political content. He repeatedly claims that Soviet citizens had long since ceased to believe in (or even to notice) the ideas underlying Soviet rhetoric, just as the townspeople in his book continually disregard or controvert the Slogan’s message. As Brown notes, “Zinoviev has an affinity with Gogol in his exposure of linguistic idiocies; both writers exhibit the linguistic forms of logical statement in an automatized state and empty of content” (314). The direct correlation between the “automatized state” of his fictional societies’ logic and its lack of substance is not only one of Zinoviev’s primary concerns, but a recurrent theme in cold war satire in general.

Sinyavsky’s metaphorical conception of a utopian Russian “island” state is the central metaphor of Aksyonov’s dystopian novel The Island of Crimea Page 130 →(1981). In this novel the island is not the entire Soviet Union but just the Crimea. Separated from the Russian mainland, rather than being connected to it by a small strip of land, Aksyonov’s fictional Crimea is an independent bastion of democratic capitalism populated largely by the descendants of former “Whites” (non-Bolshevik Communists) who fled there during the Russian Civil War. Andrei Luchnikov, the novel’s protagonist, is a well-known Crimean newspaper editor who also heads a movement called the Common Fate League (Soiuz obshchei sud’by, or SOS) that idealistically seeks reunification with the Soviet Union. With a fervent belief in enlightened Communism that hearkens back to their revolutionary ancestors, Luchnikov and his associates naively believe that the Soviets will bring order to the island’s tempestuous political climate, while still retaining certain of the more progressive policies that have allowed Crimeans to thrive economically and culturally. Although Aksyonov’s Crimea at times resembles both Taiwan and Hong Kong in terms of its historical and cultural relation to a neighboring Communist giant, the situation is more complex than that. The novel depicts the complicated fragmentation of the island nation’s outwardly idyllic society—in large measure due to the Common Fate League’s influence—prior to being forcibly absorbed by its northern cousin.

In a preface written especially for the novel’s 1983 English translation, Aksyonov frames The Island of Crimea with reference to a seminal cold war dystopia:

Every Russian schoolboy knows that Crimea is connected to mainland Russia by an isthmus, but not even every adult knows how flimsy an isthmus it is. When a Russian rides along it for the first time and sees it for its narrow, swampy self, he can’t quite suppress a seditious “what if.”

What if Crimea were really an island? What if, as a result, the White Army had been able to defend Crimea from the Reds in 1920? What if Crimea had developed as a Russian, yet Western, democracy alongside the totalitarian mainland?

The southern coast of Crimea is a subtropic zone protected from the fierce Russian winter by a range of mountains. During that winter the mountains are covered with black clouds seemingly fixed in time, while down below the sun is shining. If those isolating, doomful black clouds remind the Westerner of Stanley Kramer’s film of On the Beach, the Russian can’t help thinking that selfsame seditious “what if.” (ix).

In this novel Aksyonov plays out a scenario markedly different from On the Beach in that the catastrophe befalling the sun-drenched island society is not the result of external conflict, but a consequence of the Crimeans’ own actions, especially those of Luchnikov and his “Common Fate” colleagues in attempting to unify Russia. As Booker points out, the novel’s approach is Page 131 →simultaneously anti-utopian and dystopian, in essence refuting the potential value contained in Aksyonov’s “what if”: “The Capitalist ‘utopia’ on the island of Crimea casts the Soviet Union in a dystopian light, though the eventual end of the book calls into question the utopian pretensions of capitalism. The book’s outcome indicates that, within the oppressive context of the Soviet Union, transgressive behavior generally leads not to emancipation but to swift and brutal retribution. Moreover there is a suggestion that the material wealth and carefree Western lifestyle of the island (and perhaps of the West in general) lead to a political naiveté and complacency that make it easy prey for Soviet conquest” (Dystopian 129). Aksyonov denies the credibility of both the Communist and capitalist versions of utopia, claiming that the hindrance to critical thinking that they both represent can lead—one directly, the other indirectly—to the same end, namely, ruthless totalitarian subjugation. The recklessly blasé attitude of the Crimeans (reminiscent of the Australians in On the Beach as the end of the world approaches)²³ contributes greatly to their own demise as an independent and free nation.

Clowes notes that Luchnikov’s desire to reunite the Crimea with the Soviet Union is based on his “nostalgic, semi-Slavophile attachment to an ideal of mythical national unity.” This ideal echoes both Sinyavsky’s ours / not ours formulation and the division between apocalypticists and utopians central to Bethea’s vision of Russian history. Clowes adds a further dimension to this comparison, claiming that the most important variance between Aksyonov’s imaginary Crimea and the Soviet Union occurs in the context of ideological pluralism versus monologism: “Cosmopolitan playground, center of world trade and diplomacy, and technological miracle, this hypermodern Crimean meta-utopia is based on a multiplicity, one might even say a ‘cacophony,’ of ideological voices—all coexisting in provisional and constantly fluctuating forms of consensus and compromise. [It] is striking for its proximity to a geographical entity, the Soviet Union, that represents its ideological opposite—monological, ideologically fixed, stagnant, in short, a traditional utopia.”

She continues by making nearly the same assertion as Sinyavsky about the paradox inherent in such a traditional utopia: “In its structure [the Soviet Union] contains the unresolved oppositions of a utopia: it is isolated, yet claims international influence, drab and egalitarian yet hierarchically regimented, oppressive yet proclaiming liberationist policies” (178). Because of his traditionalist Russian views, Luchnikov fails to recognize both the value of Crimea’s extant pluralism and the degree to which the Soviet system demands a single-voiced ideology, and Clowes argues that this ignorance reflects the main target of Aksyonov’s satirical criticism: “Implicit . . . is the thought that historical determinism is a mask for an intellectually lazy and politically ruinous nostalgia for some Gemeinschaft, some easy social harmony and unity that never has existed and never will exist. In the case of Luchnikov, the dream is certainly more appealing than reality” (180). As Iskander did in Page 132 →Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, Aksyonov satirizes practitioners of overly simplistic logic along with those who aid and abet it by settling for the uncomplicated truths of tradition rather than the dangerous reality before their eyes.²⁴

From the earliest pages of the novel, Aksyonov presents Luchnikov as a man who has difficulty breaking away from traditional Russian patterns of behavior. As he drives around Simferopol, the Crimea’s ultramodern capital, Luchnikov crosses himself “out of habit” at an intersection where an Orthodox church formerly stood. Not only does Luchnikov himself question this seemingly instinctive behavior, but the narrator explains that this habit “was the subject of great glee among his new friends in Moscow,” that is, the Soviets with whom he has been in contact in his efforts for reunification: “The brightest of them, Marlen Kuzenkov, would even lecture him about it: ‘You’re almost a Marxist, Andrei, and even from a purely existential standpoint it’s ridiculous to indulge in such naïve symbols.’ Luchnikov’s standard response was a slight and slightly ironic smile, and every time he saw a golden crucifix in the sky, he continued to make a quick cross ‘as a mere formality.’ But he’d been troubled lately by the formalities, the vanities of his life style, his distance from the Church, and here he was, to his horror, crossing himself at a traffic light” (4).²⁵ Although Luchnikov’s religious habit is no vestige of Soviet thinking, it does reflect his tendency to sidestep potential contradictions. Despite living in a Crimean society that allows ideologies with disparate and even conflicting tenets, Luchnikov attempts to think in the single-minded fashion of his Soviet associates and their Slavophile forebears (with mixed success, as his conflicted reactions to his residual religious habit demonstrate). By incompletely but fervently adopting the logic of the Soviets, he marginalizes himself from both societies and fails to comprehend the world around him.

Even on occasions when Luchnikov endeavors to strengthen his convictions and transcend the simplistic logic of his Soviet collaborators, he unwittingly plays into their hands. For example, while Luchnikov is on a visit to Moscow, his paper, the Russian Courier, becomes an uncritical mouthpiece for the Common Fate League and its articles use rhetoric as empty as that of the ubiquitous slogans that shout out Communist propaganda from every corner of Moscow: “The Idea of the Common Fate had appeared on every page, but that was the problem: it had merely put in an appearance, sat there, instead of pulsating like a live artery. Soviet features and all Soviet themes had grown stiff and formulaic, almost bureaucratic in style” (237). To remedy this Luchnikov writes an article called “The Nonentity: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Stalin’s Birth” (238), in which he vigorously attacks neo-Stalinist elements in the Soviet Union for lying to the Russian people and “spread[ing] havoc throughout the land” (243). Luchnikov argues that Russia can achieve a form of utopian existence if it can manage to throw off Stalinist remnants and become a truly democratic and socialist society: “Russia has Page 133 →the opportunity to blossom into a great creative community of people communicating directly with God, yet always mindful of its own sufferings and the sufferings of others” (243).²⁶

The article creates an understandable stir among the Soviet leadership but Kuzenkov, the KGB operative in charge of overseeing the Crimea, explains the perceived shift of the Courier’s politics in terms they understand: “A passing fancy for the silly ideas of our dissidents or the new emigration, perhaps, a typically idealistic reflex” (268). Kuzenkov points out that, despite its occasional departures from strict Soviet ideology, the Common Fate League presents the best opportunity for the Soviet Union to acquire the Crimea because it stimulates “sympathy toward the Soviet Union and even the desire to merge with us” (266). The Common Fate League thus indirectly serves the ideological purposes of the Soviets, who have no intentions of allowing Crimeans to continue their way of life after reunification, as the comments of the “portrety” (that is, members of the politburo featured in Soviet propagandistic portraits) demonstrate:

“Whoa, hold on a minute. . . . Isn’t this reunification going to be more trouble than it’s worth? Where will we put them all, anyway? Forty parties and nearly as many different nations. . . .”

“The Party has amassed a good deal of experience in these matters. . . . The multiparty system, of course, can be done away with in days. The nationality issue is more complicated, though as I see it, the Greeks belong in Greece, the Italians in Italy, the Russians in Russia, and so forth.” (264)

Luchnikov’s attempt at backtracking, whether genuine or not, is thus rendered ineffectual. Not only does his rhetoric of reunification retain the utopian dream of “easy social harmony and unity that never has existed” that Clowes mentions, but Luchnikov’s monological political stance undermines his ability to condemn selected aspects of Soviet Communism. As Clowes states, Luchnikov’s “alarmist, even apocalyptic attitude toward serious open disagreement and debate” (a trait she labels as “peculiarly Russian”) makes him incapable of “tread[ing] the difficult middle realm—to be tolerant, perceive a variety of ideologies, and still act with moral integrity” (179, 181).

The novel closes with Luchnikov attending the burial of his wife, killed by the invading Soviets. Luchnikov regards his watch “in great anguish” (369) as its hands appear to spin rapidly forward, a twofold symbol that suggests both the heavy psychological price that Luchnikov’s politics have exacted from him and the fact that the Crimea is now a part of the Soviet Union, whose self-aggrandizing rhetoric frequently features the idea of accelerating progress toward the “radiant future.” Since the future of the Crimea will now presumably resemble the drab and stifling atmosphere of Aksyonov’s fictionalized Soviet Union, the symbol of time whirling out of Luchnikov’s control Page 134 →heightens the dissonance between reality and Luchnikov’s romantic vision of a unified and symbiotic Russian state.

As an intellectual and a political liberal (in spite of his pro-unification stance) who should seemingly know better than to hand his country over to the voraciously predatory Soviets, Luchnikov is only one in a series of Aksyonov heroes—including the Samopalov brothers of “The Steel Bird,” the five protagonists of The Burn, and Maxim Ogorodnikov of Say Cheese!—who embody a dystopian sentiment peculiar to the Russian intelligentsia of the cold war. As Ellendea Proffer writes, much of Aksyonov’s work from the 1970s and 1980s deals with “the subject of the sins and expiations of the Russian intelligentsia, the intelligentsia which created the monster [of Soviet Communism] and then was devoured by it” (133). She argues that Luchnikov is motivated by a sense of guilt for the actions of his class: “His reasoning is [that] . . . the Russian intelligentsia let the genie out of the bottle, caused the Revolution, then let its people suffer. It is the duty of the intelligentsia, particularly the free intelligentsia, to accept responsibility for this, rejoin the main culture, and soften as much as possible the existing regime” (136). I concur with Proffer except on the matter of “soften[ing] . . . the existing regime,” as Luchnikov’s rhetoric in the newspaper piece clearly shows a continuing tendency not to “soften” Soviet Communism but to correct it and put it back on the track to a paradisiacal society “communicating directly with God.” Utopianism remains a salient component of Luchnikov’s philosophy and provides the means by which the Soviets can manipulate him into doing their will.

Featuring an even more comprehensive catalogue of manipulative rhetorical practices, Voinovich’s Moscow 2042 is the most direct satire by a Russian writer of the forms and effects of utopian thinking during the cold war. The novel’s overall rhetorical structure principally works to undercut two intertwined notions: the utopian exceptionalism of the Soviet Union and the purely dystopian idea that anything is better than the Soviet system. Moreover, although Voinovich’s narrator/protagonist Vitaly Kartsev (biographically similar to his creator) is at times a keen observer of folly, he is also ultimately something of a dupe in his own right. Any sense that Kartsev will be a trustworthy narrator is destroyed on page one, when (after announcing that he has lost all of his notes except for an incomprehensible scribble) he tries to convince the reader of his story’s reliability: “What I describe here is only what I saw with my own eyes. Or heard with my own ears. Or what was told to me by someone I trust greatly. Or not that greatly. In any case, what I write is always based on something. Sometimes it’s even based on nothing. But anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the theory of relativity knows that nothing is a variety of something and so you can always make a little something out of nothing. . . . I think this is sufficient reason for you to have complete confidence in this story” (4).

Page 135 →Although Kartsev does not appear to be attempting consciously to deceive the reader, the combination of his pseudoscientific rationalization and the unacknowledged yet self-evident contradictions in his introduction do anything but create “complete confidence.” Similar blind spots in Kartsev’s objectivity recur throughout the opening pages of the book, placing him among the pantheon of voices ultimately discredited. In this way, Voinovich achieves a meta-utopian rather than strictly dystopian tone; his novel calls into question both simple pro-Soviet and simple anti-Soviet attitudes.

The novel’s plot concerns Kartsev’s fantastic journey to Moscow sixty years in the future. A relatively unheralded Russian émigré writer living, like Voinovich himself, in West Germany, Kartsev’s tale begins with a discussion about technology and literature with his enigmatic German friend, Rudi. When Rudi claims that Kartsev’s relative obscurity as a writer is due to his dedication to realism, Kartsev replies that Rudi’s beloved science fiction is “not literature but tomfoolery like the electronic games that induce mass idiocy.” Rudi replies that science fiction writers have proven their value by predicting dystopian social developments: “Take Orwell, for example. Didn’t he predict in detail the system that exists in Russia today?” Kartsev scoffingly rejects this notion, claiming that “Orwell wrote a parody of what already existed at the time” and that he “described a totalitarian machine that worked perfectly and could simply never exist in a real society” (6–7). Both the tenor and content of their discussion help establish Voinovich’s meta-utopian tone, as his own novel will serve both as a genre-parody of works like Orwell’s but also as a satire of Kartsev’s dismissive rejoinder, given that the dystopian society depicted in the novel is perhaps more banal than Orwell’s perfect “totalitarian machine” but is also, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, a “parody of what already existed” circa 1980 in the Soviet Union.

After their conversation begins to wane, Rudi tells Kartsev about a travel agency that can book him passage on a Lufthansa flight that moves both in space and time, traveling from Munich to Moscow and from 1982 to 2042. Kartsev initially rejects this as more science fictional claptrap, but his interest increases after visiting the travel agent Rudi recommends, especially when he learns that “there’s no limit on the amount of drinks passengers can be served on this flight, plus they’re all free of charge” (13). His enthusiasm increases still further after an American journalist named John offers to pay the nearly two million dollars that the ticket will cost as well as another million as a fee in exchange for an exhaustive article describing his journey. Kartsev briefly suspects John is a CIA agent but blithely sets aside his legitimate concerns (how does John know of Kartsev’s plans?) after John strokes Kartsev’s writerly ego by telling him that this article will be “the sensation of the century” (17).

Kartsev’s last source of reticence concerns the uncertainty about the political situation he will find in the year 2042—the travel agency can only get him Page 136 →to a given year, not predict the situation upon arrival—but he accepts John’s offer after the quintessentially Gogolian development of a conversation with “the devil who dwells within me . . . [whose] only thought has been to incite me to go on adventures” (18). Kartsev accedes to this devil’s wishes after asking whether he loves the Soviets: “‘Do I!’ cried the devil. ‘What’s not to like? They’re devils in their own way too, they’re always coming up with some jolly idea’” (19). Voinovich thus begins the book with two explicit levels of metafictional framing: a critique of the value of both science fiction and dystopian literature and the mise en abîme device of Kartsev’s ostensibly journalistic article that is both inspired by an adventure-seeking “devil” and quite possibly bankrolled by an organization in diametrical opposition to the “devils in their own way” that make up the Communist government of the Soviet Union. These overt frames are designed not just to remind the reader of the full range of genre models being parodied (and thereby continually unmasking the text’s fictionality) but also to set up Voinovich’s larger satire of the overly simplistic and serially dystopian Soviet / anti-Soviet dichotomy.

This latter theme especially is reinforced in the chapters leading up to Kartsev’s departure. In the days before he boards the plane, Kartsev encounters representatives from a variety of factions who like John have mysteriously learned about his travel plans and seek to benefit from his trip. First he is briefly abducted by a group of Arabs who want Kartsev to “bring back a detailed plan for an ordinary nuclear bomb, which they wanted solely for peaceful purposes” (25). They give him a small bag of gold for his troubles and promise him fifty times more if he succeeds. Next, while shopping for gifts to take into the future, he has a “surprise encounter” (27) with Lyoshka Bukashev, a former journalism school classmate and current KGB major general. Kartsev and Bukashev converse over beers at a café in Munich that is apparently staffed by incognito but somewhat inept KGB agents. Bukashev implies to Kartsev that he has been following him and knows all about his planned trip. After admitting that he thinks the current Soviet system is “perfectly idiotic” (33), Bukashev intimates that he would find information from the future very beneficial for making improvements to the present-day Soviet system: “It’s almost impossible not to make mistakes in such a complex operation. Now, if you could only look into the future, say, fifty or sixty years, and find out what the results would be” (36). Kartsev lies and tells Bukashev that his planned trip is to Honolulu, but harbors no illusion that Bukashev believes him.

After this Kartsev is summoned to Toronto to meet with Sim Simych Karnavalov, a reclusive, neo-Slavophile exile from the Soviet Union who bears more than a passing resemblance to Solzhenitsyn.²⁷ Karnavalov lives with his faithful entourage on an estate in the countryside named “Solace” (Otradnoe), where he constantly rehearses his triumphant reentry into Russia astride a white horse named Logos and works on the remaining twenty-four of a Page 137 →projected sixty “slabs” of his gigantic novel The Greater Zone.²⁸ Kartsev is appalled by Karnavalov’s dictatorial behavior around the estate as well as the reactionary anti-Soviet but pro-Russian nationalism he spouts for an obliging American television crew suspiciously headed by John, his alleged contact from the New Times. Despite his reservations Kartsev meets with Karnavalov, who arrogantly informs Kartsev that he will be taking with him on his journey to the future Moscow a floppy disk containing the existing thirty-six slabs of The Greater Zone, along with a wax-sealed letter addressed “TO THE FUTURE RULERS OF RUSSIA” (93). Karnavalov haughtily instructs Kartsev to use the version of The Greater Zone on the disk to proofread and correct the version he is sure will have been published (albeit with distortion) in the future Moscow and then to “turn the disk in to the Karnavalov Museum” (92) as an invaluable historical artifact. When Kartsev asks Karnavalov “with guarded malice” what he is to do if the book has not been published or if there is no such museum, Karnavalov instructs him to “print as many copies as possible. Then distribute them, the more widely the better. Just hand them out right and left. Let people discover what their voracious rulers are really like” (92). Kartsev protests that this activity would potentially prove dangerous, and Karnavalov berates him for his lack of willingness to sacrifice himself in order to save Russia from the “voracious predators” (92). Karnavalov unceremoniously calls for one of his assistants to escort Kartsev to the highway, secure in his belief that Kartsev will do his bidding. Kartsev tosses the letter in the trash upon arriving back in Munich but keeps the disk, “without knowing why myself” (93).

The inherently textual nature of Kartsev’s preflight encounters is, in my view, central to Voinovich’s satirical intent. Among the existing critics, only Clowes has examined the way in which Voinovich uses the interplay between the various implied and intrusive readers of his transparently metafictional novel to extend the satirical reach of his work: “As he plans his trip to Moscow, Kartsev runs into trouble with the intrusive reader. He is not permitted simply to appeal to and play epistemological games with a mass audience. All of the figures of the intrusive reader type in Moscow 2042 are Russian writers and political leaders of the type familiar to anyone who knows the long history of Russian literary politics” (194).

Clowes is correct in noting the existence of familiar intrusive readers such as the ubiquitous and relatively omniscient government agent that Bukashev appears to be, the “self-righteous, moralistic writer” (194) Karnavalov astride Logos (“the word” and, of course, “the Word”) or the various party functionaries that Kartsev meets in the Moscowrep²⁹ of 2042. Nevertheless her analysis also overlooks the presence of such non-Russians as John and the mysterious Arabs among their number, thereby largely missing Voinovich’s complication of Kartsev’s metafictional conundrum. Admittedly these non-Russians are minor characters in terms of the plot of the novel, but their influence over Page 138 →the metanovel (and thus the satire) is considerably more extensive. Not only is Kartsev’s text³⁰ subjected to the conventional Russian/Soviet pressures, but it is simultaneously in danger of becoming a tool of Western anti-Soviet propaganda because it was bankrolled by U.S. intelligence at a high point of the cold war. The Arabs introduce an additional wrinkle by being largely uninterested in his primary text (the story of how the Soviet Union has or has not developed in sixty years) in favor of their own text (the plans for a nuclear weapon), which is wholly peripheral to the binary geopolitics of the cold war. In short Kartsev is faced with a number of readers competing for control over the interpretation and/or content of his text even before it exists.

Communists and anti-Communists are irreconcilable enemies according to the rigid ideological and political logic of the cold war, but Voinovich repeatedly points out the absurdities of this supposedly antagonistic relationship in Moscow 2042. During their Biergarten conversation, Bukashev expresses reservations to Kartsev about the Soviet system, thereby departing from the norm for his character type in the official literature. When Bukashev surprisingly reappears late in the novel as the “Genialissimo,”³¹ the Stalin-like leader of the Moscowrep in 2042, his status as a representative of Soviet ideology is not merely invalidated but satirically inverted. Having been arrested and deposed as leader in the final days before a coup d’état led by Karnavalov, Bukashev reveals to Kartsev that he has actually been working to sabotage Communism irreparably from within even as he appeared to be its foremost practitioner:³²

“Do you remember our conversation in the English Garden?” asked my cell-mate.

“Do I ever!” I said. “I remember it very well. I even remember you saying you intended to build communism, but like your predecessors, you turned out to be a real utopian, a dreamer.”

“You’re mistaken, you little fool!” he said, quite merry all of a sudden. “I didn’t turn out to be a utopian. I did build communism.” (400)³³

When Kartsev incredulously replies that the intellectually and materially impoverished Moscowrep hardly embodies the ideal Communism he had envisioned, Bukashev replies that “when people start realizing their dreams in real life, when they start moving en masse towards a single goal, something like what you’ve seen here [in the Moscowrep] is always the result” (401). Kartsev points out that Bukashev is “speaking like a total anticommunist” to which he merely replies, “At last, you’ve guessed” (401). Even though Bukashev’s dissent is phrased in terms of a binary relationship (in which every anti- needs its corollary pro-), the paradox in which the most devoted Communist is simultaneously the most devoted anti-Communist ultimately renders the cold war’s ideological distinctions absurd.

Page 139 →The Moscowrep’s institutional structure itself confounds the division between allies and enemies; in fact, its language and rituals serve to render almost all potentially significant distinctions meaningless. Upon his arrival in the Moscowrep, Kartsev makes a discovery while reading Pravda that demonstrates what passes for ideological refinement in the Moscowrep: “Under the name of the newspaper was a line to the effect that the paper was the organ of the Communist Party of State Security. Now I understood the abbreviation I had seen on one of the banners: KPGB. The Party had merged with the KGB” (137).³⁴ Although the party and the KGB are presumably already ideologically consistent with one another, such a merger blurs the distinction between a tool of the state and the state itself. If security is not only a responsibility of the state but also its raison d’être, the instinct for self-preservation at all costs will invariably override all state decisions, a common conclusion in dystopian fiction from We onward. In essence, this combination makes explicit what had been an implicit symbiotic relationship since the early years of the Soviet Union: the party used the KGB (and earlier the NKVD) to solidify its hold on power, and the KGB assured its own survival, individually and collectively, by doing the party’s bidding.

The party’s absorption of the KGB is somewhat irrelevant, in fact, since the oppositional framework of the CIA/KGB split has also become irrevocably muddled by 2042. Dzerzhin Gavrilovich Siromakhin, a major general in SECO,³⁵ the state security organ of the Moscowrep, explains the situation to a disbelieving Kartsev:

“It’s hard for you to make sense of it all. You’re still new here. The thing is that SECO is entirely staffed by CIA agents.”

“Now listen,” I said with anger, “why are you handing me that crap, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’m aware that hostile agents could infiltrate SECO, but, if you want my opinion, saying SECO is CIA through-and-through is utter nonsense.”

“Alas, you’re still so naïve,” said Dzerzhin, cunningly narrowing his eyes. “Unfortunately, what I just told you is not utter nonsense but the whole sad truth of it.”

The sad truth, in Siromakhin’s telling, was that over the course of many years, the CIA had infiltrated SECO step by step. “It’s like a cancer, you see,” said Dzerzhin, adopting a scientific and instructional tone. “First the cells accumulate slowly. But when their number reaches a critical mass, they seize control of everything. It’s the same with CIA agents. At first, they infiltrated one by one. But later on, when they were a majority in leadership, they seized control of everything. Now their impudence has reached a point where a cleaning woman can’t be hired by SECO without Washington’s permission.” (296–97)

Page 140 →When a still-confused Kartsev asks Siromakhin why the army of the Moscowrep has not simply expelled the CIA agents, Siromakhin’s answer further confounds the binary logic: “Don’t you see? If our army smashed SECO, the Americans would respond by smashing their CIA, which is entirely staffed by SECO people, and that wouldn’t serve any purpose of ours” (297). Kartsev remains puzzled and finally asks Siromakhin, “If SECO is staffed with nothing but CIA, then which one are you with?” (297). His answer is simultaneously threatening and indicative of the paradoxes that such a question threatens to unleash: “Alright, my darling, let’s get things straight once and for all. To avoid any possible problems, you are never to ask me any more questions like that, OK?” (298).³⁶

The complete cross-infiltration of the two security apparatuses renders the Moscowrep’s xenophobic geopolitical perspective even more nonsensical. Not long after his arrival, Kartsev is informed that “the communism which had been built in the greater Moscow area naturally elicited not only admiration, but also the envy of various elements of the population living outside of its bounds” (142). What results from this supposed envy is a tripartite system of “Rings of Hostility” that describe the world in terms of a slightly more elaborate us/them construction. Communi Ivanovich Smerchev, one of the government officials assigned to help Kartsev assimilate to his new surroundings, explains the system to him:

Relations between the Communites and those living outside the boundaries of the Moscowrep were marked by a certain tension and even hostility, one which, as the Genialissimo had correctly observed, was ringlike in structure. The First Ring of Hostility was formed by the Soviet republics which the Communites called the filial republics, the Second Ring was composed of the fraternal socialist countries, and the Third by the Capitalist enemy.

“In formal parlance,” explained Smerchev, “we call them the Filial Ring of Hostility, the Fraternal Ring of Hostility, and, of course, the Enemy Ring of Hostility. But most of the time we just say the First Ring, the Second, and the Third.” (142)

The logical incongruity of phrases such as “Filial Ring of Hostility” reveals the absurdity of the isolationist position the Moscowrep has assumed, and again illustrates Sinyavsky’s point about the ambiguity, if not outright paradox, of the Soviets’ universalizing yet xenopohobic rhetoric. The contradictions also echo the rhetoric the Soviets used in “offering fraternal aid” while suppressing dissidence (and independence) in Eastern European satellite countries such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia. In essence, Voinovich’s depiction of the Moscowrep’s foreign relations is only a parodically exaggerated form of Soviet us/them logic. Even the supposedly “filial” and “fraternal” nations Page 141 →are also officially perceived as hostile simply because they lie outside the Moscowrep. The difference between the “filial republics” and the “capitalist enemy” has been reduced to a mere matter of degree.

Voinovich’s satire is not just conducted on a geopolitical scale, however. He also consistently parodies everyday Soviet administrative language, both for its extensive use of needlessly bureaucratic euphemism (a toilet, for example, has become a “natfunctbur,”³⁷ short for “Bureau of Natural Functions” [135]) and for its necessary role in masking the flaws in the system. All citizens of the Moscowrep are required to turn in their “secondary matter” (feces) in order to receive governmental coupons redeemable for proportional amounts of “primary matter” (food), including the oxymoronically named “vegetarian pork.” Although Kartsev’s description of the food he is served makes distinguishing between it and “secondary matter” difficult,³⁸ the system is inherently ridiculous because of the need for “primary matter” in the production of “secondary matter” (and vice versa) in the first place. As Clowes points out, the causal distinction between “primary” and “secondary” is rendered irrelevant, as in the relationship between chicken and egg (52). Voinovich engages in a Rabelaisian parody of the “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” credo of Soviet socialism, since need and ability in this context refer solely to excretory function rather than labor productivity. Ultimately the entire novel illustrates Bukashev’s assertion that “it’s much more difficult to convince one individual of an idiotic idea than an entire people” (403). Communism’s utopian goal of achieving a seemingly perfect society, represented in the comically idyllic dream that Kartsev has shortly after arriving in the Moscowrep, is that “idiotic idea.”

The conclusion to Kartsev’s journey undermines any notion that Voinovich’s satire is suggesting a normative solution that would simply return Russia to its prerevolutionary state. When Karnavalov triumphantly returns to the city and assumes power, he wastes little time instituting a neo-tsarist regime that becomes as socially repressive as the Moscowrep. He issues edicts (ukazy) that seek to control nearly every aspect of life, many of which hearken all the way back to the conservative society of pre-Petrine Russia (an edict “making it mandatory for all men forty and over to have beards” [407]).³⁹ Ironically many of his decrees echo policies enacted by the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Soviet Union. For example, like the Communists in 1917, he refuses to honor foreign debts incurred by the prior regime. Likewise his demand for universal conversion to Russian Orthodoxy is every bit as inflexible as the Soviet demands for total ideological uniformity from the late 1920s and 1930s. Finally, in a clear linguistic and historical parody of Soviet practice, Karnavalov decrees that all property now belongs to “His Majesty” and is “to be distributed free of charge by social committees to individuals capable of productive labor and who had avoided collaborating with the predatory communists” (407).

Page 142 →Karnavalov, though, does not limit himself to adopting the language and policies of the Moscowrep (even as he anathematizes them) but even adapts certain portions of the old regime’s infrastructure to meet his needs, as stated in his “Imperial Proclamation”: “The former organ of state security (SECO) is to be transformed into the Committee on National Peace (CNP)” (405). Like the Cheka, the political police in the early years of the Soviet Union, the CNP also has an “emergency board”⁴⁰ that carries out its most repressive actions, apparently including copious executions. The transformation from SECO to CNP is in reality little more than a name change, since this committee’s primary task is to enforce ruthlessly Karnavalov’s dictatorial edicts under the euphemistic guise of providing national peace. Although Karnavalov’s minions are rounding up and summarily executing other former Moscowrep officials, Siromakhin is allowed to keep his position in the secret police because he claims “they need specialists like me. Any regime does. No matter what kind of revolution you make, you have to have something to protect it with after. And who’s going to do that? We are. Any individual can be replaced but you can’t replace all of us at the same time” (409).⁴¹ Despite the allegedly new political situation, Siromakhin coyly refuses to answer Kartsev’s question of whether or not he is still working for the CIA, thereby implying that the larger geopolitical status quo will continue unchanged as well.

Like the essentially cosmetic transition from the Great Python to Hermit in Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, the lack of substantive difference between the Moscowrep and Karnavalov’s neo-tsarist state reinforces the notion that nothing has really changed except the superficial form and language of the rulers. The underlying rhetoric of the state remains suffused with exclusionary binaries and thus bodes another cycle of repression and violence for its citizens. Moscow 2042 thus presents a serially dystopian society that will never truly change for the better until it discovers a genuinely subversive alternative. Voinovich’s satirical depiction of nearly all the competing societal models of the cold war implies that he believes such an alternative has not yet been formulated. In some ways, Voinovich is like Bukashev in that he has exposed the absurdity of the system but cannot (or will not) provide a definitive model of his own with which to replace it. The narrative and ontological instability of the novel itself hints both at his reluctance to unequivocally propose such an alternative—perhaps wanting not to resemble Karnavalov—and at the difficulty of doing so.

Other roughly contemporary anti-utopian works, such as Iskander’s Goatibex Constellation, Tertz’s Makepeace Experiment, and the Strugatskys’ Skazka o troike (1968; Tale of a Troika) and Gadkie lebedi (1972; The Ugly Swans), similarly treat the theme of utopianism as a weakness that can and will be exploited by those seeking to impose their will on others.⁴² The recurrent subversion of various forms of grandiosely idealistic rhetoric indicates Page 143 →the degree to which official language during the cold war was subject to cynicism or outright disbelief. As the cold war progressed and the nuclear arms race augmented humanity’s ability to destroy itself, this cynicism manifested itself with increasing regularity in works that fused satire, parody, anti-utopianism, and apocalypticism to depict societies that were fundamentally diseased and deformed by the deliberate use of fabricated and fallacious language.