Imperial Bedtime Stories
Is it fair to call Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik a dystopia and The Third Empire a utopia, simply based on what is widely known about each author's politics? Perhaps it is fair, but it is not particularly sophisticated. Yurev, however, includes a number of textual clues for even the not-so-careful reader.
The most obvious clue is that the author does not seem to bother making the book interesting. That is, it has no real characters or plot. Instead, like such classics of the genre as Thomas More's Utopia, The Third Empire is part travelogue, part history-lesson, with the only continuity of character provided by the underdeveloped figure of the narrator. Nineteenth century utopias would try (often in vain) to improve on this form, grafting on a love plot (Looking Backward) or a quasi-legal drama (Herland), but, if anything, these innovations just showed exactly how poorly the utopian text tends to function as a novel.
Wisely, Yurev dispenses with the fiction that he is writing, well, fiction (in the sense of having an actually story). Instead, the entire book is the report of a Brazilian who has studied and traveled in the Third Empire, an attempt to explain this fascinating structure to outsiders. This external framework (common to many fantasy novels as well) provides an excuse for the narrative's main task: dumping huge amounts of information on the reader.
This is not to say that the book is without its pleasures; if that were the case, it is unlikely anyone would read it. The Third Empire might fall flat when considered a novel, but has a great deal going for it when understood as a political tract. Like the utopias of old, Yurev's book does not have to develop a dry, grounded, theoretical argument while trying to convince his readers to embrace his vision of a better future. Instead, he can describe this future as if it already exists, relieving him some of the burden of plausibility be letting him simply declare that possibly unlikely events have already happened.
After a brief retelling of the history of the Soviet Union (the "Second Empire") and the 1990s that consists of referring to historical figures by monarchical names ("Joseph the First"; "Boris the Cursed') and placing a decidedly pro-totalitarian, anti-liberal spin on events, the narrator's tale begins in the time of Vladimir II, the man who will reconstitute the Third Empire. Though he is not actually named, there is no pretense that we are talking about anyone other than Vladimir Putin, or that the the story begins at roughly the same time as the book's publication. This is a future history of Putin's Russia extrapolating from what was then current events, imagining an apocalyptic scenario, and indulging in a great deal of national imperialist wish fulfillment fantasy.
During the period of "reforms" and "recovery' (vosstanovlenie) that begins in the year of the book's publication, Vladimir II abolishes the oligarchs and begins the process of territorial expansion, eventually including Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Transnistria, and parts of Abkhazia in a new Russian Union. Everyone is perfectly happy to join the new Union, as they all understand that the collapse of the USSR was not a natural process, but the result of American machinations (as were nearly all terrorist incidents that took place in the post-Soviet space). When his second and constitutionally mandated final term as presidency come to and end in 2008, he remains in power in this successor to the Russian Federation.
Vladimir II reminds his subjects that Russia has always been "a separate, ancient, and self-sufficient civilization, one where status is more important than money, and where "personal success" cannot give life meaning. The renewed pride in all things Russian extends to the pettiest of details, from the calendar (back to the Julian system!) to motor vehicles (no longer will the automobile-driving population face the ignominy of license plates using Latin rather than Cyrillic letters).
Still, Vladimir merely lays the groundwork for his successor, Gavril the Great. Gravril wins the presidency in 2012 and holds a successful referendum transforming the Russian Union into the Third Russian Empire, under a system of governance to which we will return shortly. As a result of the West's overreactions to his foreign policy (and his decision to stop selling gas to Europe), Russia and NATO go to war. Thanks to the superiority of the Russian military and the convenient discovery of new types of weaponry with no basis in scientific fact, the war lasts twelve days, ending in the total capitulation of the United States.
And this is where the wish-fulfillment fantasy truly comes to the fore, as Gavril arranges a parade in honor of Russia's great victory:
a plane carried America's elites arrested especially for this occasion (and sent back home and released the very next day to be displayed on Red Square: President Bush III [Jeb] and former Presidents Bill Clinton, Bush Jr. (W) and Hillary Clinton, the current and former members of the cabinet, congress, and senate, along with bankers and industrialists, newspaper columnists and television anchors, famous lawyers and top models, pop singers and Hollywood actresses. They all paraded across Red Square in handcuffs with nametags around their next--everyone except the military prisoners, who walked with full honors. The Russian authorities let their citizens and the whole world understand that Russia fought and defeated not the American army, but American civilization.
Russia's 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine, which the leadership has insisted on casting as a proxy between Russian and the West, make it difficult to read The Third Empire as mere fiction. But Yurev's novel was by no means the only one to imagine an East/West final battle talking place on Russia's Western border. What really stands out is, instead, the text's sheer joy in every instance of advancing even the smallest element of what might be called "Russianness," while imagining a humiliating conquest of the West that is so spectacular as to be virtually pornographic. This, perhaps, is the aspect of The Third Empire that truly warrants praise for its prophecy: the atmosphere of intense ressentiment and xenophobic fury that it shares with Russia during the "special military operation."