a look at yesterday's tomorrow
This is one of the more significant novels about the Stalinist period. It is a short book and , unfortunately, no translation can do it full credit because Platonov recreates the style of Party Newspeak to which all official communiques in Russian had degenerated in his time. The book is, strictly speaking, a satire but it is scarcely a comedy. Of course, it could not be published until well after the author's death. (Platonov died in 1951- two years before Stalin's demise.) In a wider sense, it is about any human beings in the pressure cooker of a "politically correct" regime which has reached escape velocity from rule of law. I warmly recommend the work to anyone interested in these topics.
