“Who wouldn’t recognize, amid the crazed architectural flourishes of Downtown Simferopol, the assertive skyscraping simplicity of the pencil-like home of the Russian Courier.” Thus begins one of my favorite novels of the twentieth century. The same novel ends with Russia annexing Crimea after its citizens are snookered into requesting the invasion themselves: in other words, it eerily anticipates this week’s news.

Written in 1979, Vassily Aksyonov’s “The Island of Crimea” imagines an alternative history (abetted by alternative geography—Crimea is a peninsula) wherein the Russian civil war ends with the tsarist forces able to hold onto this southern scrap of the old empire. Skip forward sixty years, and Crimea is a booming Hong Kong to the U.S.S.R.’s China. To the contemporary Soviet reader, almost every word in that opening sentence invited giggles of dizzy disorientation. A skyscraper—in Simferopol! The idea that a newspaper can be called a “Russian” (as opposed to “Soviet”) anything, let alone an ultra-bourgeois “Courier”! Where in the world are we?

Where we are, in fact, is not in an earnest counter-historical what-if but instead inside the eternal fever dream of the Russian intellectual: what Russia could have been if not for the path it chose. While Aksyonov paints the neighboring U.S.S.R. as an inferno of scarcity, cruelty, and idiocy—somehow managing to sound like an outside observer (he wrote the book just before emigrating to the United States)—he can’t help gleefully stuffing his imaginary Crimea with every cool thing that a Soviet hipster could think of: high-speed freeways, a hopping jazz scene, swinger clubs, an auto industry producing Peter-Turbo roadsters and luxurious Russo-Balt cars (an actual brand whose production ceased with the revolution), Novy Svet champagne, posh villas, Burgessian Russo-Anglo-Tatar youth slang, and a tony night club named after Nabokov. And then he proceeds to throw it all under the Russian tank tracks.

In the U.S., where “The Island of Crimea” came out in 1983 (in Michael Henry Heim’s translation; I’m using my own for the quoted bits), it was rather expectedly read as a dissident tract. “Most of Mr. Aksyonov’s shafts are directed at Communism, but capitalism comes in for a few,” Walter Goodman wrote in a Times review, citing a fleeting jab at the supermarket culture. In fact, the novel is far more sophisticated and provocative than that. The Anschluss central to its plot is, of course, a metaphor for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—which was portrayed as “requested,” just as Putin is justifying Russia’s current military incursion into Crimea as addressing the plight of the ethnic Russians there. But it’s the slow run-up to the disaster that shows the real target of Aksyonov’s satire, which is relevant to this day: the gullibility of the Western left when it comes to Russia.

Aksyonov had travelled in the U.S. before, and, like most Soviet dissidents abroad, he was dumbstruck to find many of his Stateside counterparts in literary and academic circles leaning toward Marxism. As the son of a victim of the Stalinist purges (Yevgenia Ginzburg, whose memoir is required reading alongside Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” and to whose memory “The Island of Crimea” is dedicated), Aksyonov must have been appalled by the Western idealization of the Soviet state. This distaste bubbles up through the portrayal of the novel’s central character—Andrei (Looch) Luchnikov, the Russian Courier’s denim-clad, red-mustached publisher and editor. A Bond-like hero on the surface (he even carries a Beretta, like 007), Luchnikov is, in fact, a softie pinko whose naïveté undoes the nation. His, and the Courier’s, pet cause is the so-called Idea of Common Fate: a faddish dream of reunification with Russia. In Crimean liberals’ self-sacrificial fantasies, their own worldliness will serve as an acculturating shot to the rest of the U.S.S.R., making the monstrous motherland more modern and humane. Even Luchnikov’s Moscovite friend Marlen Kuzenkov, a cynical Soviet functionary tasked with monitoring Crimea, looks on in horror as the Common Fate doctrine spreads through Crimea’s chattering classes. Before committing suicide, Kuzenkov poetically slurs Luchnikov, calling him “a pathetic pilot fish for a giant senseless shimmering shark.” The Common Faters win local elections and, blindly trusting the Soviet Constitution—which did specify the republics’ right to self-determination and even to their own armed forces—they request inclusion into the U.S.S.R. The Soviet tanks rumble in at once, under the guise of a bilateral “military-athletic festival.” The passages describing the invasion from the Crimeans’ point of view—clueless to the last—rank among the most excruciatingly precise, funny, and hopeless in Russian letters. An example: