This year marks 100 years since Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s influential dystopian novel “We” was published. This novel significantly impacted George Orwell’s creation of the famous dystopia “1984,” published in 1949, and played a vital role in the early development of science fiction as a genre. Both “We” and “1984” shaped the Cold War-era western perception of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime. Although Orwell had never visited the Soviet Union, and Zamyatin wrote his dystopian work during 1920 amidst civil unrest only a few years after the Bolsheviks seized power, these novels depicted a society where the individual’s identity merged into the collective “we.” In both narratives, an all-seeing leader (the “Benefactor” in Zamyatin’s work and “Big Brother” in Orwell’s) is revered as a source of wisdom. A secret police force (the Guardians in Zamyatin and the Thought Police in Orwell) ensures any dissenters disappear. Personal life is heavily regimented, leaving minimal personal freedom. In “We,” people live in transparent houses, and blinds can lower only for scheduled intimate encounters with registered partners. Deviating in thought is deemed a state offense and falling in love becomes a bold defiance of the collective identity.
Zamyatin composed his novel while residing in a special House of the Arts in Petrograd, present-day St Petersburg, under the protection of the writer Maxim Gorky. Gorky used his influence with Bolshevik leaders to provide refuge for writers and artists from the harshest conditions during the Civil War and under the Cheka, the newly implemented revolutionary police. It might be presumed that Zamyatin, like many in the Russian intelligentsia who were radicals under the Tsar, became disillusioned with the chaos and political upheaval that led to the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in October 1917. However, Zamyatin had once been a Bolshevik himself, though he was no longer actively involved at the party’s forefront. Born in 1884 in the town of Lebedian, about 370 kilometers south of Moscow, Zamyatin grew up in a family considered part of the provincial intelligentsia. His father was a priest, and, unusually, his mother was a pianist. Zamyatin’s solitary childhood experiences led him to find solace in reading, and in his teenage years, he became a socialist, joining the Bolshevik party to partake in the 1905 uprisings while studying in St Petersburg. His involvement led to arrests and provincial exile, yet he still managed to graduate in shipbuilding engineering and started his writing career.
In 1916, the Russian government dispatched Zamyatin to England to work on constructing ice-breakers, causing him to miss out on the February Revolution and the tumult that followed. He returned just before the October Revolution on a British ship, a journey marked by constant threats from German submarines. Missing the revolution left a profound impact on him, likened to the regret of having never experienced love before finding oneself married. Yet, it’s challenging to envision Zamyatin succumbing to the euphoria that swept through the Russian intelligentsia in 1917. He was naturally a solitary person and an instinctive satirist whose typical reaction to collective zeal was dissent.
The strange atmosphere after October intrigued Zamyatin, noting the winter of 1917-18 as a peculiar, unsettling time when everything seemed to drift into the unknown. Revolutionary Russia, marked by shortages, dysfunctions, identity shifts, and grandiloquent rhetoric, provided ample material for satire, a genre that flourished during the 1920s through writers like Mikhail Zoshchenko, Mikhail Bulgakov, and the duo Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. While their satire was often affectionate and coming from insiders, Zamyatin’s was cooler and harsher. He viewed being a heretic, regardless of whether under a Tsarist or Soviet regime, as essential for “true literature.” He criticized the so-called “nimble” writers who readily supported the new Bolshevik regime and proclaimed themselves part of the “court school” while filling the air with their vibrant declarations.
This disdain was returned with enthusiasm in the politicized arts world of early Soviet Russia, and denunciations in literary journals were a frequent problem for Zamyatin. He faced multiple arrests by the Cheka, and when he wrote “We” in 1920, Soviet censors rejected it. An American publisher released the first complete edition in English in 1924, and it wasn’t published in the Soviet Union until 1988. The novel depicted a future society where individuals became compliant parts of a machine, with the Guardians managing dissenters. Zamyatin’s encounters with the Cheka, the censors, and conforming writers inspired the novel, with the Benefactor character resembling Lenin’s baldness and Dzerzhinsky’s arrogance.
Educated contemporaries of Zamyatin would have identified the Benefactor with loftier literary figures like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and Solovyev’s Antichrist, figures who argued for institutional collective wisdom against heretics. Zamyatin once referred to the emerging Bolshevik orthodoxy as a new branch of Catholicism, as intolerant of dissent as the old. While “We” is seen by some as predicting Stalinism, it also reflects futuristic regimentation envisioned as utopian by futurist and constructivist artists like Gastev, who founded the Central Institute of Labour to mechanize worker productivity.
As these avant-garde movements sometimes oppressed dissenting artists and appealed to authorities to silence critics, Zamyatin was increasingly marginalized. His 1931 letter to Stalin asked for permission to leave the country due to rising persecution from literary circles. Stalin allowed this, though Zamyatin phrased it as a temporary departure. While Zamyatin’s sometime patron Maxim Gorky returned to the Soviet Union after the demise of the oppressive Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, Zamyatin did not return. Moving to France—despite being better at English—he anticipated rejection from Russian émigrés due to his Bolshevik past. Zamyatin passed away in 1937 during the Great Terror in the Soviet Union—an ordeal he likely would not have survived had he stayed.