Day of the Oprichnik: A novel

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The Tsar, whom Komiaga always refers to as "His Majesty", appears as a shining hologram dispensing vapid and asinine remarks, which Komiaga insists represent the most profound and deep wisdom as he states with great conviction: "His Majesty sees everything, hears everything. This was a very specific mix, this book, this creepy neo-patriarchal grotesque somewhat scifi-ish dystopia.

The term "Grey Turmoil" is a reference to the "Red Turmoil" of 1917 and the "White Turmoil" of 1991.

I do not know enough about the FSB (or the KGB when Putin was in it) but I am assuming that while there may be some similarities to the Oprochniks, a lot is different. The zmei gorynych proceeds to rape and kill an American woman, who symbolizes liberty and individualism, marking the triumph of the Asian collectivism over the Western individualism, the Russian "we" over the American "I".

After murdering a boyar, gang-raping his wife, and setting fire to his mansion, he lectures a colleague that smoking is an impure act. Women appear in Day of the Oprichnik only as rape victims, entertainers or sex objects as the unpopular czarina becomes popular because of her "mesmerizing" breasts. My favourite bit: His Majesty’s father, the late Nikolai Platonovich, had a good idea: liquidate all the foreign supermarkets and replace them with Russian kiosks.That pretty much sets the tone, as Komiaga proceeds to fly to a nearby province to ensure the right people get the right bribes to allow a Chinese freight train to get to Europe intact, reviews a theater production for sensitive themes and language, negotiates a backhander from a prima ballerina to save her friend, consults a strange Rasputinesque seer in a tower outside of Moscow, and has a nervous audience with Her Highness, before concluding the day with a hedonistic bathhouse debauch with his boss and fellow oprichniks (this climactic bacchanal is as sordidly nasty as any imagined by Irvine Welsh, and I'll never see the word "caterpillar" the same way again.

I rather lost track of the body count during the course of the book but there is no doubt Komiaga and his associates clearly enjoyed themselves, with killing, torture, flogging heterosexual and homosexual sex, drugs use, alcohol and wine, special privileges, outwitting the Chinese and did I mention that they have glowing genitals?The most notable distinguishing marks of the vory are that their bodies are covered with elaborate tattoos full of symbolism about their status within the vory v zakone and that they always wear Orthodox crucifixes around their necks. In Day of the Oprichnik , [Sorokin] combines futurological invention with political archaism to vicious satirical effect . For further reading, see Charles Clover’s excellent in-depth analysis of Eurasianism in Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism ; Ian Kershaw’s comments on Putin’s “modern-day version of medieval feudalism” in Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 ; and especially Gary Lachman’s Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump , a provocative study of the shared postmodern esoteric roots of alt-right US and Russian politics today. What Vladimir Sorokin does in Day of the Oprichnik is to move the institution into the near future in a post-Putin society in which the West has been walled off and the Chinese are moving into Russian society. Starting hungover, alternate future oprichnik Danilovich jams more into his day than most could take in a week.