An America thoroughly fed up with both politics and political correctness slogs through a surreally dirty, bizarre, and finally insane election season—and, when the dust settles, finds itself in the grip of Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin.

No, this is not a tinfoil-hatted take on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and its alleged Russian connections. It is a satire very loosely based on the 2000 election and called “How Putin Became President of the USA”—the title story in a 2005 book of “new Russian fairy-tales,” or political fables, by one of post-Soviet Russia’s preeminent writers and public intellectuals, Dmitry Bykov.