Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Russian, 1964)

Summary:
As a noble in Arkanar, Don Rumata enjoys a life of leisure in a kingdom filled with squalor. While the King can barely be bothered to look after his subjects, Don Reba, the Prime Minister of the kingdom, is who really is in control. After managing to posion of the King’s mind, Don Reba convinces him to hunt down the intellectuals. Many knowledgeable men have already fled to the neighbouring Duchy of Irukan; their escape has been successful because Don Rumata and other Dons have been clandestinely working against Don Reba and his campaign to maintain people in ignorance. It is revealed that Don Rumata and his comrades were born back on planet Earth, but started living in an unnamed planet—where Arkanar and Irukan are actually located—in order to observe and report back to Earth on the colony of humans. The monarchic regime was not chosen because it suited the necessities of the planet or its population the best, but because the colonizers of the new planet are unaware that 1) they are not the first men in the universe and 2) as a newly formed society, they are historically way behind their planet of origin. Rumata and the other observers are forbidden from interfering in the new planet’s development in any way; these instructions lead Rumata to despair and to question his passivity. Additionally, Rumata has fallen in love with a native girl, Kira, who is witty enough to abhor the cruelty in which her country is imbued, but is unable to actually change something because she is a commoner in a medieval society. 
 As Rumata very openly confronts Reba on his crusade against knowledge, the Prime Minister seizes the control of the country and executes the King and his sole heir. Rumata is imprisoned due to his opposition to Reba. The two Dons then hold a private conference in which Reba reveals he has kept Rumata under vigilance for quite some time and, noticing Rumata’s many qualities, Reba has come to fear him; Rumata quickly realises that the ‘supernatural’ Reba perceives in him is, in fact, Rumata’s own superior intellect and the technological devices he has brought from Earth. Since the city fell in disarray after the coup, Don Reba arranges for the Holy Order, a group of military clergymen, to regain control of the city by murdering anyone they may encounter. Rumata and Reba come to a truce of sorts: Rumata will not be harmed and will be permitted to take Dr. Budach away from prison only if Rumata refrains from attacking Reba’s regime. With Rumata’s help, Budach is able to leave the country not long after he has been freed. However, a few days after Budach’s departure, a group of soldiers attack Rumata’s house in an attempt to capture Kira; as Rumata tries to scare away the attackers one archer manages to fatally shoot Kira. 
 Back on Earth, Pashka tells to his and Rumata’s childhood friend, Anka, that by the time Earth sent someone to check on Rumata, he had already made his way to Reba and had murdered him. Rumata was then sent back to Earth as punishment for all the deaths he had caused.

Another summary:
The story begins when Anton, along with Anka and Pashka, discovers a strange, abandoned road that says to lead to a "wrong way". After realizing the presence of a destroyed car that seems to come from the other side of the road, Anton decides to cross to see what is there. He finds a collapsed bridge and a German man's skeleton chained to a machine gun.
 
 Years later, when they are older, Anton goes from Earth to the Arkanar Kingdom, the same planet where the story starts. When he takes office as Don Rumata, his mission in that place is to investigate the disappearance of Doctor Budah, a renowned scientist allegedly kidnapped by the prime minister of Arkanar, Don Reba. The latter blames all the educated people of the kingdom for the bad things that have happened to him, so it is assumed that he has strong reasons to kidnap Budah.
 
 For his part, in an attempt to prevent Arkanar from being taken over by fascism, Rumata tries to protect as many science and arts scholars as he can from the prime minister, and attempts to persuade his colleagues that it is necessary to act in a more radical way. However, two of his colleagues, Don Hug and Don Kondor, reject his enthusiasm to get involved in such matters without being careful about the dangers that they entail, so he has to continue according to the plan. Rumata tries to get information from many people, such as Waga, a member of an organized crime group, and Dona Okana, a woman very close to Don Reba. At this point, he starts to protect a woman called Kira, in whom he is interested romantically.
 
 His other projects do not seem to go very well, as Arkanar gets closer and closer to being the undesirable place that he had imagined. This leads him to publicly accuse Don Reba of being the one guilty of kidnapping the doctor who would treat the King's ailments. Reba admits his guilt, apologizes, and presents a man as Doctor Budah, only to gain the people's trust and be able to kill the King's heir, which he finally achieves.
 
 After the prince's murder, Rumata is brought before Don Reba and he confesses to having a particular interest in him and tries to make a deal with him. Meanwhile, Rumata realizes that all that has happened is a plan orchestrated by Reba to blame him for the assassination of the King in order to execute a coup d'état.
 
 Waga and his people begin to plunder the city with the approval of Don Reba, who commands the Holy Order's army to finish off those criminals in order to get on the people's good side. After this, he becomes a magistrate of the Holy Order and governor of Arkanar, which he renames the Order's province. Rumata, meanwhile, makes a peace pact with Don Reba in order to rescue the actual Doctor Budah, but throughout the struggle, many of his allies die.
 
 After the rescue of Budah, Rumata intends to escape with his beloved Kira to Earth, but she is killed by soldiers while they are trying to kidnap her. This unleashes the fury of Rumata, who goes to the palace and murders Don Reba. In the epilogue, Pashka tells the events to Anka while they are at a hospital waiting for Anton, and he starts to think about the "wrong way" they found when they were younger and its probable relation to the events that occured.

Another summary:
The book begins with three friends who find themselves roaming and exploring around some rarely traveled forest in a medial-like world where Anton finds an old WWII German skeleton still tied to a machine gun. These kids grow up to be observers in the planet they were on back then, a planet that is not the Earth they lived in. Anton takes on the role of Don Rumata and is in charge of overlooking the Kingdom of Arkanar. For a little while now things have not been going too well. Rumata is in charge of finding Dr. Budah who has gone missing and Don Reba, the prime minister of the kingdom, is the prime suspect. This man has, for a while now been attempting to get rid of or suppress the educated in the Kingdom as he saw them as a threat to social order. 
 Rumata is working towards saving the bright educated minds just as he is trying to prove that he is right about Reba disappearing all these people. Not only that he also has to convince his fellow collegues that this is the right thing to do as they are all aware that it is not their job to change history but only to observe it. Nonetheless he makes an effort to discover more regarding these disappearance and eventually accuses Reba in front of the King. Reba claims that he had only been trying to protect the King because he hadn’t thought the Doctor had been good enough for him but agrees to let him go. This Dr. Budah, who doesn’t seem to be the real one, gives a potion to the King that turns out to be poison and the King dies. This bodes bad for Rumata since now it seems that he is organizing a coup. He helps Dr. Budah escape and plans for his own retirement back to Earth. In the end, as he is attempting to leave with Kira, the woman he loves, she gets killed and in a mad frenzy he engages in a brutal fight with the soldiers that killed her. In the end we see his childhood friends talking about Rumata and how they hope for his recovery.

World view: The world portrayed in the story is an hypothetical society which seems to be worse than the one the author lives in.
Future projections: The perfectibility of mankind through science and technology is presented as desirable.
Ideology: The majority is oppressed by a ruling elite or an individual powergroup that come to dominate society to their own interests.
Characters, plot and writing style: The story features a rebellion against the adverse circumstances (revolutionaries may exploit newer technologies for these ends).
Classification: Non-dystopia