Australian businessman George Smith, formerly Russian Georgy Kuznetsov, seeks to take away his wife and son. For this purpose, after several years of emigration, he returns to Russia, where another revolution took place, and the National Salvation Front, a symbiosis of communists and fascists, came to power. The vitality and ordinariness of the situations in which the hero finds himself distinguishes this dystopia from “propaganda horror stories.” The border between the fictional and the real in the novel is so vague and ephemeral that it seems that any Russian city with a high degree of probability can turn into a post-revolutionary Obsk, where the described events unfold.