4 ideas
In the steppe town of Chevengur, the local revolutionary leader Chepurny and his comrades shoot the bourgeoisie in a staged 'Second Coming', expel the semi-bourgeois, and bring in homeless drifters called 'the others' to be the new proletariat. They then stop working, since the sun is said to labour for everyone, and wait for history to end. A mother's child dies in the town anyway, and an unnamed military detachment later destroys the commune.
In Chevengur, declaring communism already achieved and abolishing labour and property encourages the residents to wait for history to end rather than pursue a further program. The novel shows much of this waiting as idleness, bewilderment and continued grief, yet it also shows the residents caring for one another and taking up work again for each other's sake.
Read the characters' hunger for communism as a search for a lost parent, lost comrades and the dead, not as economic doctrine. Sasha Dvanov's father, a fisherman, drowned himself in Lake Mutevo out of curiosity to see what death was like. Sasha's journey to the ideal society ends with him riding into the same lake to rejoin him, so the utopia and the grave turn out to be one destination.
The Bolshevik knight-errant Kopenkin rides a horse named Proletarian Strength and serves the dead Rosa Luxemburg as his Lady, much like a chivalric romance hero, so that his revolutionary doctrine takes the form of literal devotional faith. In Chevengur slogans become physical acts such as killing and dragging houses and gardens across town, though the residents move houses partly to satisfy authority and not only out of belief.