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Anthony Murawski's avatar

HIs book wasn't intended to predict the future, but it was set in the future and involves a landscape he could not have possibly lived through first hand. Of course, Stalin's purge of the POUM in Spain opened Orwell's eyes. He experienced the fear of knowing he was on Stalin's wanted list as he and his wife hid in abandoned buildings for about five days, before escaping Spain. But he never lived through the dystoptian nightmare he descrcibed. And he took a lot of inspiration from Zamyatin's We (written in the Soviet Union in 1920-1921; Zamyatin was one of the few openly opposed Stalin, but was allowed to emigrate after he resigned from the Writers's Union in 1929 as his colleagues were denouncing him. Like Victor Serge, he complained directly to Stalin of the oppression he was experiencing, and like Serge, he was allowed to leave the country with Gorky's interrcession. Sometimes thugs and mass murdererers do unpredictbable things, such as allowing their bravest crritics to leave the country. Zamyatin was allowed to leave in the early 30s, and Victor Serge was allowed to leave in 1936 after directly criticizing Stalin for his consolidation of power and persecution of his victims, also with Gorky's intercession. Serge also wrote to Stalin directly, complainining that Stalin had made it impossible for him to work. Gorky the lackey put in a word for both few writers of far higher calibre than him while Gorky felt insulated from the purges, although an interntational campaign by writers on Serge's behalf is what resulted in the sole instance of dissident writer being forced out of the country instead of murdered during the Great Terror of the mid-1930s.

Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a masterpiece in the same vein as Darkness At Noon. Serge finished writing the book in 1942, and he died in 1947. Orwell attempted to help Serge get the book published in the mid-1940s, but Orwell could not get Animal Farm published for roughly a year because of the alliance with Uncle Joe. Serge was apparently the first person to describe the Soviet Union as a "totaitarian" state, in a letter he wrote to friends in Paris on the ever of his arrest in Leningrad in 1933.

I'd say The Case of Comrade Tulayev is as powerful a book as 1984.

Like Orwell, Serge fought as a member of the POUM in Spain. Serge was an early member of the Bolsheviks, but he became openly critical of Stalin by 1925 (or a few years earlier). He was first exiled internally before Stalin put him on a train in 1936 going west.

Although 1984 is a better written book in just about everyone's opinion than We, it is very much like Zamyatin's book. Of course, Orwell wrote that he wanted to write the same kind of book as We. Orwell did a much better job conveying the schizophrenic effect of double-think, and of conveying the fear the main character experienced. Zamyatin's main characIer, D-503, was only discovering that he was a person and not just a scientific worker bee assigned to build a space ship. D-503's range of feeling was not nearly as deep as Winston's. We would have been much more like 1984 had it been written from the perspective I-330, the woman who helped lead the revolt against OneState and it's leader, the Benefactor, and recruited D-503 to the cause.

If Zamyatin hadn't beat Orwell to the theme, I would say that limited aspects of 1984 did turn out to be prophetic. There was no privacy in Zamyatin's OneState or in Orwell's Oceana. There is no privacy in the United States (as you know, the NSA can listen to you using your cell phone while it is off). But the technology to listen to everyone is hardly necessary to create a terror state, and I'm not saying the United States has become even remotely comparable to the Soviet Union under Stalin, or at all comparable to the dystopian novels mentioned in this posting. That would be a prepostrous comparison. On the other hand, the United States has truly horrific nightmares in other countries, such as Guatemala and El Salvador (two of over a dozen such examples), where dissidents or just being the wrong person in the wrong place resulted in unspeakable torture and hacking off of limbs before one's corpse was found on a garbage heap.

Although domestic conditions in the U.S. are not at all comparable to the Soviet Union under Stalin, I see the possibility of things turning in that direction. I'm very fearful when an increasingly large segment of the public advocates for a postmodernist, totalitarian agenda. Humans can be so savage toward each other that it defies belief. Our species will not last, of course. We will destroy ourselves, or die out for other reasons.

Sorry this is so disjointed and for any typos. Time to go to sleep.

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