Ivan Vasilievich

4 ideas

1. Building manager accidentally becomes Tsar Ivan

   In 1930s Moscow, engineer Timofeev's experimental time machine hurls building manager Bunsha and petty thief Miloslavsky into the Kremlin of the 16th century, while Ivan the Terrible lands in the communal apartment building. Because he looks like the tsar, Bunsha is accepted on the throne, where he stamps decrees, fusses over protocol, and lets Miloslavsky casually hand the Swedish ambassador the Kem district. Meanwhile the real Ivan, marooned among telephones and neighbours, is hunted as an impostor by the very building apparatus Bunsha used to run.

2. Petty bureaucracy and autocracy share one operating system

   Bunsha governs medieval Muscovy without difficulty because the skills a building manager needs, which are issuing orders, demanding papers, stamping documents and expecting deference, are the same skills a tsar's court runs on. Swapping the smallest Soviet official for the most absolute ruler changes almost nothing about how power is exercised, which suggests that Stalin-era petty officialdom is a scaled-down autocracy rather than a break from it.

3. Office is recognised by trappings, not person

   The court obeys whoever sits in the royal robes on the throne, so a timid functionary is taken for Ivan the Terrible, while the real Ivan loses all authority in a setting that has no throne. Seen this way, legitimacy lives in costume, setting and ritual rather than in the individual, and an institution will keep functioning around a figurehead who has no idea what he is doing.

4. Official anxiety as self-protective paperwork reflex

   Even while he wields absolute power, Bunsha keeps worrying about how his conduct will look on paper to the Soviet authorities, and he is desperate to keep his class origins and his record clean. The satire's mechanism is a functionary whose first loyalty is to his dossier rather than to any outcome, so he commits absurd or harmful acts calmly and panics only over formalities that might incriminate him.

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