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.