George Orwell’s dystopian novel «1984», set in an imaginary future where totalitarian rulers deprive their citizens of any freedom of action to maintain support for senseless wars, topped the bestseller list in Russia. And to think that a few months ago (over 70 years after it was written) the book was banned in Belarus by the Kremlin’s iron ally Alexander Lukashenko: his government had ordered that it be withdrawn from every bookstore, even those online. “From now on it will be forbidden to even own a copy,” thundered the government spokesman, as was the case in the Soviet Union until 1987.
And instead today – they write on the CNN website – Orwell’s masterpiece is the most downloaded fiction download of 2022 on the Russian online library platform LitRes, and the second most popular in any category.
The English author’s novel was published in 1949, when Nazism had just been defeated and the West’s Cold War with its former ally Josef Stalin and the Soviet Communist bloc it now led was just beginning. The book was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988.
Orwell said he used Stalin’s dictatorship as a model for the all-seeing Big Brother cult of personality, whose “thought police” force intimidated citizens to engage in “doublethink” to believe that “war is peace, freedom is slavery”.
But not a few see contemporary echoes in the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who uprooted political opposition and critical media from the public sphere during his two decades in power, as well as rehabilitating the memory of Stalin.
The invasion of Ukraine in February led to new laws that made it a crime to publish any information about the war that conflicted with official statements. The Kremlin avoids the word “war” itself, speaking as it does of a “special military operation.”
Well, the Russian translator of a brand new edition of “1984” sees more than one parallel between Putin’s Russia and the plot of the novel. “Orwell could not have dreamed in his worst nightmares that the era of liberal totalitarianism or totalitarian liberalism would come to the West, and that people – separate, rather isolated individuals – would behave like a raging herd.”