Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich

Author:Vladimir Voinovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

THE AUGUST REVOLUTION

From what I could gather from Iskra, television, and the newspapers, it was difficult to form any sort of complete picture of exactly when the August Revolution took place, and what was the main cause of it. Still, from various odds and ends of information, I came to the following understanding.

Before the revolution, when there was no such thing as the Moscowrep, the Soviet Union had been ruled by men of profound old age. That is, they were old in age but not always profound. They usually seized power when they were at the peak of their strength and health. And each time they set about bringing in younger men. But, in the time it took to bring in those younger men, they would usually have grown old themselves and, wise with age, would conclude that the most progressive form of government was senilocracy. And they would hold onto their posts until the day they died. The next generation of leaders would again set about bringing in younger men, but they, too, would not have time enough to accomplish this. Due to the high standard of living and medical progress, each new generation of leaders was older than the previous one. Things had reached a point at which, of the twelve members on the last Politburo, seven finished their years of service in a state of utter senility, two were permanently confined to wheel-chairs, one was completely paralyzed, another deaf as a post, and the leader, who ruled over them all, spent the last six years of his life in a coma.

It was then that the Genialissimo launched the revolution, which was the result of the so-called “angry KGB generals’ plot.” I would very much have liked some details about this, but history was not one of Iskrina’s strong points; she had spent too much time studying the preliminary language.

She had heard about those days only from her grandmother, who said that all the generals were young and vigorous, and all handsome to a man. When they took power, they decided immediately to do away with bad management, bureaucratism, bribe-taking, theft, favoritism, regionalism, cronyism, individualism, idle talk, glorificationism, verbosity, ostentation, drunkenness, phrase-mongering, hare-brainism, and bungling. They would step up discipline in production and fight for an overfulfillment of plans. They displayed great energy, meeting with die masses and delivering speeches, but no one toiled harder than the Genialissimo. He traveled throughout the country, demanding increases in oil extraction, steel smelting, and the cotton harvest; he studied the problems involved with the egg-laying abilities of a variety of hen types and kept a close watch on sheep litters. But, since the country was too large for him to keep an eye on everything, he decided to use advanced technology and instituted a regular series of inspection overflights in a spacecraft. From that vantage he could observe troop movements, quarry excavations, timber falling, the construction of various installations, and open-pit coal mining. He delved into everything. Sometimes he would even

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