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Context (Moscow Times)
August 27-September 2, 2004
Old Regime
Unable to accept the denigration of Josef Stalin, a devoted party functionary cohabits for 40 years with an iron statue of the Soviet leader in Vladimir Voinovich's new novel, "Monumental Propaganda."
By Laurel Maury
Laurel Maury is an editorial assistant at The New Yorker.

Monumental Propaganda
Vladimir Voinovich
Knopf, $25.00

As an artist, Vladimir Voinovich would make a good drinking buddy. Though not a graduate of the gulag, the 71-year-old dissident writer has important pieces of the past embedded in his memory. One imagines that he knows every Russian drinking protocol to rustic perfection, and that his sense of humor doesn't quit after 3 a.m.

It is a tribute to the artist and the man that he does not write from bitterness. Born in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan and a city replete with faded 19th-century glory, Voinovich tried to preserve his artistic integrity as a writer under the Soviet system. A 1975 interview with the KGB, after which he almost died, gave him second thoughts. In 1980, he went to Munich with his wife and daughter. Happily, the fall of the Soviet Union has since allowed him to divide his time between Russia and Germany.

One has to admire someone who, instead of raging at having wasted his prime on ridiculous ideals, turns to intelligent laughter. "Monumental Propaganda," Voinovich's first novel to appear in English in nine years, is funny, quotable and full of things that make you pause and scratch your head: Did Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and the rest of the bloody bunch ride in to power on a form of Russian mysticism? How much difference is there anyway between Soviet and mafia family privilege? Was Stalin's cult of personality sexual?

Voinovich has always been interested in the life of the everyday person, a life that totalitarianism can turn into utter farce. The heroine of "Monumental Propaganda," Aglaya Revkina, is just his latest example. A loyal provincial party apparatchik and loveless woman (as a partisan, she blew up her husband along with a power station during World War II), she commissions a statue of Stalin in the late 1940s. Up goes another Stalin on another pedestal, like some stone guest of cast-iron, ready to drag those without faith in communism off to hell. Half religious icon, half golem, the statue seems to gaze at you as it strides through the mist. Even pigeons know better than to perch on Josef's peaked metal cap.

The statue is Aglaya's greatest triumph. So when the 1956 Party Congress debunks Stalin's cult of personality, Aglaya rescues her beloved "comrade" from being dismantled for scrap and installs him in her apartment. The thing stays with her for the next 40 years while she slowly goes insane. Most marriages don't last that long, and at least contain the possibility of sex. To make matters worse, her nonconformist neighbor keeps the BBC turned up loud on his illegal shortwave -- Aglaya gets to hear about the de-Stalinization of the Soviet world as she stares into her beloved Stalin's iron eyes.

With her theft, Aglaya becomes the toast of the town malcontents, who admire her rebellion, if not her reasons. But to her disappointment, no one even arrests her. The party simply strips her of her job, and gives her something menial and out-of-the-way to do. From time to time, she happens across other closet Stalinists, including a middle-aged general who wants to sleep with her. She also suffers mystical Stalinist visions, though, as visions go, they're pretty run-of-the-mill. Even Soviet mysticism is banal. Years pass, and Aglaya withers with her world.

Aglaya's story is Voinovich's in mirror image. Both tried valiantly to stay in the Soviet system while remaining true to their principles. Both were exiled. But where Aglaya willingly commits herself to internal exile when Stalin is debunked, Voinovich was forcefully driven from his country by threats, by harassment that resulted in the death of several family members, and (he believes) by a doctored KGB cigarette that nearly killed him.

At one point, Aglaya asks, "If you don't like Comrade Stalin, then why didn't you say so while he was alive?" Hers is almost an artistic innocence. One wonders if Voinovich might have expressed a similar innocence early in his career as a faithful Soviet writer. In books from the early 1960s, such as "I Want to Be Honest," about a construction foreman who refuses to compromise his principles, Voinovich showed a desire to think freely within the system. But by the time he wrote "The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Chonkin" in the early 1970s and its continuation, "Pretender to the Throne," he had already distanced himself from the Soviet regime.

Despite his graver gravitas, Voinovich is part of the same era and school of thought as the American satirists Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut, and Andrew Bromfield's translation skips along like a wisecracking schoolgirl who has the goods on her elders. With perhaps too many side stories crowded into the narrative, "Monumental Propaganda" sometimes drags where it should bounce, but it's still a necessary read. One gets the sense that Voinovich is trying to get everything that he has left unsaid down on paper, uncut. A prerogative that he, along with only a few other satirists, has earned.