Russian satirist Vladimir Voinovich, who writes about the “complicity between the ruler and the ruled,” is profiled in the current issue of The New York Review of Books in an essay by Gary Shteyngart. Calling him “possibly the most important Russian satirical writer of the last fifty years,” Shteyngart compares Voinovich’s work to brilliance of Joseph Heller‘s Catch 22. Voinovich, whose own father was sent to the Gulag, was known early as the author of the “official anthem of the cosmonauts,” but he also wrote his early novels within the confines of the socialist realist orthodoxy. He is well known for several novels he wrote in Russia, but he was eventually sent into a forced exile in Germany in 1980, where he wrote The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, and where he remains, living in Munich. Monumental Propaganda, his first novel in twelve years, is just out in the U.S., telling a story set over a half-century of Russian history, following heroine Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, a Stalinist whose “entire life is shorn of its grand ideological purpose.” The heroine meets her demise late, killed when her apartment explodes; she dies “pinned beneath Stalin’s statue.”