Remaining true to Stalin and his statue

In the final pages of his new novel, satirist Vladimir Voinovich likens Russia to a zoo. After years of yearning, the animals have been released and enjoy “the pleasure of running around on the grass.” But the carnivores are gobbling prey with abandon, so the herbivores decide freedom isn’t worth the constant fear of being eaten. They want the zookeeper back.

“Monumental Propaganda” is the satirical sum of the last decade of Voinovich’s critical thinking on Russia, a “zoo” of 36 billionaires (the carnivores) and 31 million other people who survive on less than $3 a day (the herbivores).

It is a mockery and an apology of one such herbivore, the celibate, dogmatic and grumpy Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina. She will be familiar to those who have seen the defiant babushkas standing at Moscow subway station entrances, wearing tattered medals on gray and shapeless frocks, holding portraits of Stalin and chanting strains of Soviet marches.

Aglaya, known in her small village of Dolgov as Oglashennaya (“the woman possessed”) or Ogloedka (“the bone gnawer”) has an exemplary Communist Party track record, culminating in a stint as district party secretary when she oversaw the installation of an impressively lifelike statue of Comrade Joseph Stalin in the main village square in 1949.

The novel begins in 1956, after she has retired from that post (which was “gobbled up by more predatory comrades”). Nikita Khrushchev is the nation’s leader and Stalin’s crimes and cult of personality have been denounced. Aglaya enters the story stamping down a village street, muttering furiously about recent notices calling for the replacement of Stalin’s portraits with images of “Baldie” (her epithet for Khrushchev). She is outraged by her comrades’ fair-weather loyalties and refuses to do anything to demote Stalin. At an ensuing meeting of Communist Party members, a bedlam of Soviet villagers lurches from nonsensical cheering to witch-hunting mass hysteria and she is expelled from the party.

As if adding insult to Aglaya’s ideological injury, the townspeople decide to turn Stalin’s monument into scrap metal. Stirred to action, Aglaya diverts the tractor driver whose task it is to haul away the statue and bribes a crane operator to hoist the effigy through her apartment window into her high-ceilinged living room. Thus begins her bizarrely intimate relationship with her “iron lodger.”

Voinovich’s best satirical moments in “Monumental Propaganda” depict Aglaya’s total anthropomorphizing of the statue. At first she fusses about her cherished cohabitant, dusting, polishing and admiring him at different distances. Soon she begins to notice the statue’s varying moods based on current events.

Eventually, she is embracing him, kissing him, bringing him good and bad news, cheering with him, crying with him and imagining the body beneath his metal clothing.

After the statue’s removal, the people of Dolgov, prone to provincial mysticism, exchange reports of terrifying sightings of the statue’s nocturnal wanderings from Aglaya’s apartment. The village is home to a motley crew of Soviet-style buffoons: One cheats on his wife, another listens illegally to foreign radio stations, one official refuses to take bribes, others settle petty scores or range around in boredom.

Unfortunately, Voinovich inserts two redundant but persistent characters into the fray: a village idiot, Shurochka, and a hackneyed rendition of a local wise man, the Admiral. Both are thinly disguised mouthpieces for the author, delivering his grandiose conjecture on the moral degeneration and herd mentality of the Russian people at the end of various red-herring subplots. The author even introduces his characters’ dreams to convey the moral of a particular tangential story line. Voinovich commits a cardinal sin of satire: making explicit what is implicit in his mockery.

“Monumental Propaganda” compounds this with another transgression: great length at a slow pace. The narrative meanders through 30 years of Soviet history in Dolgov as leaders’ portraits are replaced in succession on walls; glasnost and perestroika make fleeting appearances; eventually, “New Russians” and their Mercedes infest even the sleepiest corners such as Dolgov.

Throughout, Aglaya mostly is holed up in her apartment, occasionally consorts with her more nostalgic and elderly compatriots, is mocked by the rest of the village and generally passes 30 years in a drunken haze with her statue. The reader gets lost in the zookeeper-less zoo accompanied by an idiot and a sage.

Eventually, Voinovich forces his novel to a clumsy end with a meteorologically impossible storm in Dolgov, during which Aglaya’s building explodes in connection with a double murder and suicide.

Although the novel begins with an entertaining Soviet burlesque, it uneasily ushers its communist masses into the current era, in which the seeming absurdities of a giant country in the throes of reinvention are complex, perhaps not yet ready for ridicule.

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Natasha S. Randall writes about U.S. books and publishing for Publishing News and is translating a novel from the Russian for Random House.