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What Orwell owes to Yevgeny Zamyatin The radical Russian influenced all the greats

The front cover artwork of the penguin classics 1993 edition We. Credit: Penguin.

The front cover artwork of the penguin classics 1993 edition We. Credit: Penguin.


September 16, 2024   7 mins

It’s difficult to imagine this quiet bucolic corner of London being the point of origin of the defining dystopia of modern times. Yet, according to literary folklore, it was here in a Canonbury beer garden, in the shadow of a vast horse chestnut, that George Orwell first conceived the idea for 1984. The location would even make it chillingly into the novel: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me…” Of course, this was a very different London, of ration books and bomb sites, and a recently widowed Orwell was already coughing up blood from the tuberculosis that would kill him. The future was, understandably, to be afraid of. Yet the seeds of 1984 originated decades earlier and over a thousand miles away, blowing in across the seas from what had been St Petersburg.

Despite themselves, censors point out which books are worth reading. The Soviet Union created a banned reading list that was second to none — Pasternak, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Nabokov, even Orwell. The very first book condemned by the state’s own Ministry of Truth Glavlit was written by one of their own, the naval engineer and communist veteran Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

The author had impeccable radical credentials. He was a shipbuilder, behind what would become the Lenin icebreaker. He’d taken part in the “whirlwind” 1905 Revolution and made it back from overseas at great risk to the very heart of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Before that, he’d been imprisoned and exiled several times by the Tsarist regime, an experience that had made him a writer rather than breaking him. “If I have any place in Russian literature,” he admitted, “I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police”

The problem with Zamyatin, for the new regime, was twofold: he was a natural rebel and a mathematician. He had chosen his occupation through sheer belligerence, dedicating himself to the subject he had struggled with at school. And he knew enough of his trade to know that applying mathematical criteria and machine analogies — the abstraction of suffering, the delusion of perfectibility, utopian expediency — to humanity would have horrific consequences.

It might be thought that Zamyatin would have been free to speak and protected by his Old Bolshevik history. Yet Lenin’s communists showed early on they had little inhibitions about repressing those who’d built the revolution and in whose name the party supposedly ruled. They’d also no aversion to killing troublesome writers, executing the poet Nikolai Gumilev, for instance, under the fictitious guise of the Tagantsev conspiracy.

In such a climate, science fiction offered a tangential way of telling the truth, of demonstrating where the regime was heading, with a degree of plausible deniability. Though it would become an effective tool in the post-Stalin years, with the Brothers Strugatsky smuggling messianic questions past the censors in their astonishing alien visitation tale Roadside Picnic, it was an exceptionally dangerous gamble. Even the Bolshevik hero Mayakovsky found the sky came crashing down on him for tangentially criticising the new order in his futuristic plays The Bedbug and The Bathhouse. Zamyatin, however, was as headstrong as he was prescient. And so, a century ago, the novel We was born, a book that went on to directly or indirectly influence almost every dystopian book and film of the century to follow.

Set in 30th century AD, We takes place in a society that has aimed at and supposedly achieved perfection. This has occurred after the apocalyptic trauma of the Two Hundred Years War, which killed all but 0.2% of the population. In order to prevent conflict, any conflict — anything that differentiates or divides — has been minimised or excised, including identity, excellence, idiosyncrasy, even personality. The society is revealed to us via a curious ruse — part-diary and part-message to future extraterrestrials “to save them by force and teach them happiness”. It’s written by D503, a scientist who is leading the construction, not of an icebreaker but, a spaceship called Integral. He’s a kind of anti-Zamyatin who’s done well under the system and has little friction with it, until he meets the rebellious I-330. His emerging feelings for her threaten everything he believes in. Via the disruptive nature of love, he’s introduced to insurgents dedicated to overthrowing the One State, a chaotic world beyond the Green Wall, and the vertigo of freedom. 

While dystopian novels such as The Iron Heel and The Sleeper Awakes pre-date We, as do the utopian texts they were upturning, so many dystopian tropes, from Logan’s Run to the Hunger Games, would first emerge here in then-innovative forms. Zamyatin noticed early on the Bolshevik obsession with “modernising” everything, in appearance, and satirised it throughout We. Russian institutions had their formerly archaic titles and heraldry discarded, to be replaced by acronyms, abbreviations and portmanteau (Gosplan, NKVD, Comintern, GULAG etc), which suggested dynamism. There was an ominous obsession too with productivity, alluded to in We with its 24-hour clock, “inspiring” 1984’s opening line: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

Indeed, many aspects of We made it into 1984, albeit through the grimy prism of post-Blitz London. Surveillance is everywhere, though Zamyatin’s comes from glass buildings and listening devices rather than telescreens. While Orwell did draw attention to the novel in an essay for The Tribune, it’s telling that he covered his tracks by damning it with faint praise, labelling the novel as: “one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age” and having the brass balls to imply that Brave New World plagiarised the book. Where We and 1984 differ is in mood and format. We has a strange avant-garde style that is reminiscent of the not-yet-annihilated Russian Futurist world of Vertov, Tatlin and co, whereas Orwell is more ashtrays and spam. One soars into oblivion, and one sinks.

All great dystopias of the future, the truism goes, are really about the now. Reversing 1948 to 1984, Orwell simply followed the threads of duplicity in contemporary rhetoric and the press, the horrors of ends justify the means in politics, the grotesque moral acrobatics required by any corruptible yet infallible orthodoxy. These things were all too evident after Stalin’s purges. How did Zamyatin know what would come to pass before it happened? Well, for one thing, he was not the first. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was scathing in his exchanges with Karl Marx  — “the instinct of liberty is lacking in him; he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian” — and correctly foreboding as to where his gospel would lead. Zamyatin had the extra dimension of being an engineer and it might be surmised, in the tenor of our times, that he wrote of how technology corrupts us. But instead he showed how we corrupt technology and wield it against each other. He knew physics for sure, but he knew human nature even more. 

The portents are dark in We. In Soviet terms, “the war between town and country” in the Two Hundred Years War prophecises the inferno of collectivisation and the Holodomor. The unease we might feel today reading We, however, is one of creeping recognition. He writes of the cult of productivity of Taylorism and how “he didn’t think of extending his method to the whole of life, to every step, to the entire day”, which predicts the unending hustle of today, wherein everything from sexuality to trauma is monetised and branded. In Zamyatin’s characters’ speech, we might see a particular contemporary condition; they continually preface what they are saying with ritualistic explanations and the performance of self-denunciation, which we see today in identitarian catechisms and, for example, land acknowledgements that do nothing to address injustice or land theft. Familiar mantras, internal censors, and in-group signalling is evident throughout the dialogue of We, despite being written a century ago.

We shows us that contemporary phenomena like cry-bullying, purity spirals and safe spaces are not uniquely contemporary, partly because they are simply secularised symptoms of faith. As JS Carr has noted, “The ideal of absolute mathematical order has become so ingrained in the mind of the protagonist… that he now feels actual oppression from that which stands in contrast to the One State’s teachings.” It might offer some comfort to know that the craven have always been with us. Zamyatin rightly points out that the victory of dogma over free expression results in “the entropy of thought”, and he rails against the overt politicisation of literature, which always ends in convention, if not outright servitude. 

It takes love, or rather desire, to fuck up this wretched fabrication of utopia. In a world where everything is problematic and everyone, bar the administrators, is paralysed, the impulse to lust, to have, to possess becomes not just disruptive but revolutionary. Here we find another borrowing by Orwell. In both books, love is transgression and must be defiled and betrayed as it is a threat to the system. In the case of We: “Every number has the right to any other number as a sexual product”, and satisfaction is ticketed and approved by the state. It’s hard to read of this systemisation of sex without thinking of how it’s been commodified in our broken time by dating apps and deluges of porn, resulting not in mass libertinage, but younger generations having less sex than their predecessors.

“It takes love, or rather desire, to fuck up this wretched fabrication of utopia.”

One notable difference between We and 1984 comes with the fact that, in Orwell’s vision, tyranny is imposed whereas in Zamyatin’s vision it comes as a kind of relief. In this, the latter was more accurate. Zamyatin returns to the Matrix-like choice of Eden: “To live without illusion is to live without comfort, not all cut out for it, few can bear it, but great are those who can.” A wise judge of character, Zamyatin recognised that society was not cynical but infantilised, and most of us are not dissidents-in-waiting but rather responsibility dodgers. When he writes of “unfreedom” being “happiness”, Zamyatin is foreshadowing Orwell, but he is always looking back too, to the supposed Fall of Man from Paradise. His characters touch on this, damning Satan as the “bringer of dissonance, the teacher of doubt”, while his state develops an operation to surgically extract the imagination when it is scarcely necessary. He knows resistance is always a minority position, and yet everything depends on it. 

What of those who ruled and benefited from this warped state of affairs? The abiding feeling by the end of We is fear and neurosis. We know enough about totalitarian history that any attempt to perfect human beings — the Übermensch or the Stakhanovite Homo Sovieticus — ends with inhuman monsters. Yet, the urge to perfect nevertheless continues, from our execrable managerial revolution, the misuse of AI, and the puritan deconstruction of all that’s historically and culturally flawed. Fear is rife in We and it trickles down from above.

Zamyatin would eventually escape the Soviet Union into exile, with the help of Maxim Gorky, and by sending a suicidally confrontational letter to Stalin, who, ever the capricious tyrant, let him go. He would find no peace in Paris, among the fallen aristocratic White émigré he despised. He remained a true rebel and therefore an exile even among the exiled. His imperfection was his making and undoing. 

“To err is human” is not an excuse — it’s a foundation stone. Zamyatin, constructor of ships, knew that humans could not and should not be constructed: “Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.” Disturbance keeps us real and honest, while certainty is deadening and antithetical to the human psyche. 

Zamyatin pushes beyond the claustrophobia of dogma into panoramas, a writer who sees that our messiness, clamour, indignities and imperfections are the qualities that save us from ourselves as much as ethics and integrity. In a paradoxical sense, Zamyatin was that most despised and persecuted of Soviet figures, the wrecker, and he absolutely excelled in it. Consider all ideologies as echo-chambers or gated communities, where most of the work goes into maintaining the wall between belief and the encroaching reality outside. In We, the authorities admit “with that Wall we isolated the mechanical, perfect world from the irrational shapeless world of trees, birds, animals”. And there’s Zamyatin, 100 years later, prising open gaps in those walls, chipping away to let the chaos of truth in, like everything depends on it because everything does.


Darran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities and Inventory.


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Brett H
Brett H
5 days ago

People wonder at how authors like Zamyatin and Orwell could have been so prescient as to forecast what’s happening today. Of course what’s happening today is exactly what they had observed and experienced themselves. They didn’t create from imagination some dystopian future, they saw it already existed and reported on it. What we’re moving towards today is not just some fictional dystopian novel that happens to coincide with the times but a world that had already existed and in fact never went away.

Michael Cazaly
Michael Cazaly
5 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”…William Gibson

CF Hankinson
CF Hankinson
4 days ago

Great article thanks. WE stopped me in my tracks when I read it as a very young woman in the early seventies. I’d cut my teenage teeth on science fantasy, (a minor branch of sci-fi) Ray Bradbury, and PKDick were my favourites, before I read Orwell who had escaped such classification probably a class influence. And here was surely the UR of such critical fantasies, a Soviet version compared to the capitalist ones though both wrestling with autonomy versus authoritarianism, the rational versus emotional, control versus chaos, freedom of the market versus the monetizing of everything. Safety from starvation versus lack of freedom. Written so many years earlier. The errors of either positions taken too far. Thanks

Walter Marvell
Walter Marvell
4 days ago

Superb essay

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 days ago

I’ve been critical of this writer’s two most recent articles for Unherd on the grounds of playing to popular culture but here he absolutely redeems himself.
I’d not heard of Zamyatin (no apologies for that) but a review of his life and work a century on is more than welcome, and reveals him to be a forerunner of some later cultural icons of literature and film which is quite remarkable.
What it demonstrates is a testament to the human spirit. There’s something atavistic about human thought, which can be viewed either positively and to be treasured, or negatively and to be eradicated. The key characteristic of those who wish to eradicate it is authoritarianism, in all it’s guises: whether state-sponsored or organised religions.

Simon S
Simon S
4 days ago

Brilliant – and thank you Unherd for publishing this.

How many of us believe what we think/perceive we need to believe, to conform, and how many of us grapple with the truth?

Dominic Heaney
Dominic Heaney
4 days ago

One thing about “We” is that it is as much a reworking and development of an earlier work by Zamyatin, a short story called “The Islanders”, as it is a key source for “1984”. And that is set, as the title suggests, in Britain, and was based in part on Zamyatin’s experiences of living in Jarrow before the First World War. There, the character who becomes the Benefactor of “We” or the Big Brother of “1984” is called Vicar Dooley, who essentially serves as a kind of spy-in-chief (whether more reminiscent of workings of the Russian Orthodox Church than the Church of England or not I would not care to say), all the while managing the intense tensions between the “rational Anglo-Saxon” and “emotional Celtic” peoples among his flock. (in another story by Zamyatin, a vicar spends his time parading around “Hampstead Park” -presumably “Heath” – separating courting couples.)
All of this is a slight aside, other than to note that the origins of “1984” were ultimately from an ur text that was also set in a recognizable England (albeit as viewed by a foreigner who had not spent an immensely long time in the country) – and perhaps Orwell thus breathed new life into, rather than creating afresh, some of those aspects of the English character that might lend themselves towards totalitarianism – a love of snooping and self-righteousness perhaps being foremost among htem.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 days ago
Reply to  Dominic Heaney

Zamyatin also lived in middle class Jesmond, a suburb of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and a plaque sits proudly on the wall of his former house in Sanderson Road.
Newcastle was a perfect example of a successful industrial City in those days, and he was scathing about the proprieties of the managerial class living around him.

Panagiotis Papanikolaou
Panagiotis Papanikolaou
4 days ago

Quite interesting article. Having recently read “We” I think there is a distinct differentiation with 1984, as the former deals mainly with the emotional machinations of the system and it’s psychological effects on the individual, whereas in 1984 Orwell provides a more detailed analysis of the propaganda tools and methods used to control the masses.

I partially disagree with the statement that in 1984 tyranny is imposed whereas in We it comes as a relief.
In the end of 1984 the protagonist realises that he loves the Big Brother – granted he is forced through torture, but in both cases the populace is managed and controlled via emotional manipulation and not so much through brute force.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 days ago

Finding out that Orwell was more of a reinterpretor than stone cold creator was disheartening. That said, 1984 is a significant reinterpretation and frankly better written.

William Amos
William Amos
4 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

In his other novels Orwell also borrowed heavily from George Gissing. Very heavily indeed for Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
It needn’t diminish him, necessarily. Rather like Johnson he was a first rate critic and essayist but a not-quite-first-rate novelist.

Last edited 4 days ago by William Amos
michael harris
michael harris
4 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Had he written just this one sentence his reputation would shine through the galaxies…
‘All animals are equal bit some animals are more equal than others.’

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 days ago

Lots of excellent points. Others have pointed out that Gogol and Dostoyevsky perceived the growth of the totalitarian mentality. I wonder if Russia was special in its use of modern-seeming bureaucracy or if the modern bureaucracies are really a throwback to primitive forms of crowd control.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 days ago

Solzhenytsyn, in some ways,shared much with Zamyatin he too was disappointed in exile as he saw up close the deep flaws in the USA. It would be deeply illuminating ro have those 3 carryout a symposium…

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
22 hours ago

Foretelling Stalin? Little could exceed the horrors of the Russian Revolution, the Cheka kill lists, the famines , the class massacres, the invasion of the Caucasus and Central Asia, under Lenin.