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The Island of Crimea
“Who wouldn’t recognize, amid the crazed architectural flourishes of Downtown Simferopol, the assertive skyscraping simplicity of the pencil-like home of the Russian Courier.” Thus begins one of my favorite novels of the twentieth century. The same novel ends with Russia annexing the Crimea after its citizens are snookered into requesting the invasion themselves: in other words, it eerily anticipates this week’s news.
Written in 1979, Vassily Aksyonov’s “The Island of Crimea” imagines an alternative history (abetted by alternative geography—the Crimea is a peninsula) wherein the Russian Civil War ends with the Czarist forces able to hold onto this southern scrap of the old empire. Skip forward sixty years, and the Crimea is a booming Hong Kong to the U.S.S.R.’s China. To the contemporary Soviet reader, almost every word in that opening sentence invited giggles of dizzy disorientation.
...
What makes “The Island of Crimea” more than good satire, however, is its miraculous restoration to relevance every time Russia takes a hard turn...once again, Aksyonov has proved spookily prescient. For instance, the political landscape of his fictional Crimea includes a vicious ultraright formation called the Wolf Hundred, run by a leather-clad maniac with friends in high places; this week an ultraright Russian biker gang called the Night Wolves, whose leather-clad leader is pals with Putin, took up positions guarding government offices in Simferopol. After this, it’s hard to see the newly minted Crimean prime minister’s last name as anything other than life completely curdling into meta-fiction. It’s Aksyonov.
Written in 1979, Vassily Aksyonov’s “The Island of Crimea” imagines an alternative history (abetted by alternative geography—the Crimea is a peninsula) wherein the Russian Civil War ends with the Czarist forces able to hold onto this southern scrap of the old empire. Skip forward sixty years, and the Crimea is a booming Hong Kong to the U.S.S.R.’s China. To the contemporary Soviet reader, almost every word in that opening sentence invited giggles of dizzy disorientation.
...
What makes “The Island of Crimea” more than good satire, however, is its miraculous restoration to relevance every time Russia takes a hard turn...once again, Aksyonov has proved spookily prescient. For instance, the political landscape of his fictional Crimea includes a vicious ultraright formation called the Wolf Hundred, run by a leather-clad maniac with friends in high places; this week an ultraright Russian biker gang called the Night Wolves, whose leather-clad leader is pals with Putin, took up positions guarding government offices in Simferopol. After this, it’s hard to see the newly minted Crimean prime minister’s last name as anything other than life completely curdling into meta-fiction. It’s Aksyonov.
Link to the rest, which I highly recommend. Entertaining, and cringeworthy in the part where it gets into the Western left's relationship with the USSR, which for some folks around here seems to continue down to the present day, complete with a thread here on DU asking if Ukraine can control its righties, but not whether Russia can do that with theirs, of course:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/03/the-great-1979-novel-that-predicts-russias-crimea-invasion.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter
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