What do twenty-first century American readers know about the twentiethcentury Soviet Union? Probably very little, I’d guess. Two generations have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the Soviet satellite-states in Eastern Europe (the so-called Warsaw Bloc), along with the dissolution of the Soviet Socialist States in the Baltics, the Balkans, and Central Asia, ended the Cold War superpower struggle between the United States and the USSR, which some, like Samuel Huntington and Frances Fukuyama, claimed the United States had won when the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1991. And with the spectacularly anticlimactic passage of the Cold War era, Western (and especially American) interest in the Soviet Union decreased dramatically, making scholarly Sovietology an almost extinct academic discipline and placing the twentieth-century Soviet Union roughly on par, in the public mind, with the tenth-century Byzantine Empire.

After the chaos and confusion of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Boris Yeltsin struggled, only partly successfully, to bring democracy to post-Soviet Russia, and finally sent the post-Soviet tanks against the Russian Parliament in 1993, a “New Russia” gradually emerged— Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation— that, superficially at least, bears little resemblance to the Stalinist Communist Soviet Union. And the glorious heyday of the Cold War, when Soviet political dissidents and Russian samizdat writers served as political pawns for Western agents, and the United States and USSR carried on a feverish propaganda war for global hegemony, has faded from memory, along with obscure world historical events like the Stalinist Great Terror, the Moscow show trials, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Khrushchev's “We Will Bury You!” speech.

What do contemporary readers know about Vladimir Voinovich's Tribunal? Probably even less, I’d guess. Published only in an extremely limited edition by a Russian émigré publishing house in London in 1985, Voinovich's Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts has never gotten the attention of his major novels, like The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, or his critical essay collections, like The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union, that made him one of the most famous Soviet dissidents of the Cold War era.