The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  D-530 is a mathematician working on the Integral, a spacecraft intended to extend the One State to new worlds, and writing a diary that will explain the system to readers who he believes will resemble his barbaric ancestors. His smug, condescending account of “mathematically infallible happiness” parodies the evangelical tone of utopian tour guides like Bellamy’s Dr. Leete: “It is amusing to me—and at the same time very laborious to explain all this.” Zamyatin enjoyed Jerome K. Jerome’s “The New Utopia” and there’s comedy in D-530’s earnestly proud explanations, like the title of a famous One State tragedy: He Who Was Late for Work.12 But he ends up documenting instead an unravelling mind, as the perfect equation of his life is disrupted by the unknown X and the impossible √-1. As he mentally malfunctions, “like a machine being driven to excessive rotations,” his writing is infected with flawed memories, elisions, paradoxes, doubts and dreams: the “ancient sickness” which he has contracted from the erotically liberated revolutionary I-330. His story runs away from him.

  Orwell thought that We had “a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarize.” Put simply, it involves a band of revolutionaries called the Mephi, who try to hijack the Integral, blow up the Green Wall, and bring down the One State, all with the ambivalent involvement of D-530. The Benefactor fights back with the Great Operation, a lobotomy-like process which removes the imagination and renders citizens “machine-equal. The path to one-hundred-per-cent happiness is clear.” So much for the perfect society; perfect brains are required. The book ends with I-330 being tortured to death while a smiling, pacified D-530 insists that the One State will win: “Because reason should win.”

  Zamyatin’s own conflict with the state didn’t end well either. For this remarkable man, whose principles always overrode his instinct for self-preservation, We was primarily the novel that shattered his life. That’s why Orwell described it as “one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.”

  “Perhaps the most interesting and most serious stories,” Zamyatin once wrote, “have not been written by me, but have happened to me.”

  Yevgeny Zamyatin was hell-bent on making life difficult for himself. Born in the provincial town of Lebedyan on February 1, 1884, he was a bookish, solitary child. “Gogol was a friend,” he wrote, as if he needed no others. When he graduated from school in Voronezh in 1902, he received a gold medal for his academic achievements, and a warning. The school’s inspector showed him a pamphlet by a Voronezh graduate who had been arrested for revolutionary activity three years earlier: “He also finished with a gold medal and what does he write? Of course, he ended up in prison. My advice to you is: Don’t write. Don’t follow this path.” Relating this anecdote, Zamyatin drily added: “His admonition had no effect.”

  That, at least, is how Zamyatin told it, in one of three autobiographical sketches that he wrote for Russian publications during the 1920s. Whether or not the conversation unfolded exactly like that is irrelevant. This is the story he wanted to tell: the man who swam against the tide whatever the cost. Struve called him “an eternal rebel against the established order of things.”

  Zamyatin went on to study naval engineering at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute and found a city roiled by radical meetings and demonstrations. “In those years, being a Bolshevik meant following the line of greatest resistance,” he wrote, “and I was a Bolshevik at that time.” Over the next decade, he was arrested three times by the tsar’s police. During one period of forced exile from the city, he began writing fiction. “If I have any place in Russian literature, I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police,” he later joked.

  During the First World War, Zamyatin was both a known dissident and a valuable citizen with skills that Russia could not afford to lose. In March 1916, he was dispatched to Britain to design and build icebreakers for the Russian navy. He fitted in quite well. A trim, handsome, stylish man who liked to wear tweeds and smoke a pipe, he had the emotional reserve, his friends thought, of an Englishman. There he wrote The Islanders, a knifing satire of middle-class conformity. He returned to Petrograd a few weeks before the October Revolution.13 For Zamyatin, who was no longer a Bolshevik, it felt as if a bomb had dropped in February and spun in circles for eight months before actually detonating. “When the smoke of this tremendous explosion had cleared at last,” he wrote, “everything turned out to be upside down—history, literature, men, reputations.”

  Zamyatin had a dialectical view of history. “Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis; and tomorrow, the synthesis,” he wrote in his 1919 essay “Tomorrow.” He thought Russia’s political synthesis, which ensured both social justice and the freedom of the individual, was yet to come. To this he added the idea, from the German physicist Julius Robert von Mayer, of a cosmic struggle between Revolution, the life-force, and Entropy, which tends towards stasis and death. Dogmatism, to Zamyatin, was political Entropy. “Eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation,” he declared. “The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy.”

  Zamyatin fell in with a group of writers, led by the critic Razumnik Ivanov-Razumnik, who called themselves the Scythians, after the tribe of nomads who had patrolled the Russian steppes two thousand years earlier. But they soon parted company because Zamyatin thought that to say that the October Revolution was the final answer, to turn Bolshevism into a new religion, was fundamentally un-Scythian. The true Scythian, he insisted, was a perpetual rebel who “works only for the distant future, never for the near future, and never for the present.” His words were both thrilling and exhausting. Amid a long, bloody civil war to safeguard the revolution, most people did not want to live and die for the distant future. Zamyatin practically guaranteed that the new Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, would dislike him as much as their tsarist predecessors. The magazines who dared to publish his combative articles and satirical short stories were shut down. In February 1919, Zamyatin was arrested, but he talked his way out of jail and found a sympathetic sponsor in the form of Maxim Gorky.

  Zamyatin had met Gorky when he returned to Petrograd during the chaos of September 1917, so he always associated him with the sound of gunfire. With his tobacco-yellowed moustache and rattling cough, the forty-nine-year-old Gorky was the titan of Russian literature, lionised for his 1902 social realist landmark The Lower Depths, and for his early support for the Bolsheviks, which had led to imprisonment and exile. He fell out with his old friend Lenin in 1917 but mended bridges the following year and used his clout to support writers whose situation was far more precarious.

  During the civil war, when Russians were struggling to afford bread and fuel, let alone books, only propaganda-minded writers could make a living. Gorky’s remedy was to become, in Zamyatin’s words, “a kind of unofficial minister of culture, organizer of public works for the derailed, starving intelligentsia.” A one-man bridge between the artists and the bureaucrats, Gorky founded organisations including the House of the Arts, a palace converted into a writers’ hostel, and World Literature, a publishing house which translated classic works with new introductions by Russian writers. He was flooded with entreaties from the families of men arrested by the Cheka and often travelled to the Kremlin to petition Lenin personally for their release.

  In 1920, Zamyatin cofounded the All-Russian Union of Writers (VSP), running the office in Petrograd. “The writer who cannot become nimble must trudge to an office with a briefcase if he wants to stay alive,” he wrote. The nimble were the ideologically flexible writers who followed the party line. “You really do have to be an acrobat,” said Aleksey Tolstoy, an aristocrat who smoothly reinvented himself as an agile sycophant. To Zamyatin, this was artistic suicide: “True literature can exist when it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics.” He was a popular man—“amenable, quick-witted, hard-working, easygo
ing,” said one colleague—and an inspiration to the school of experimental young writers known as the Serapion Brothers. He was also a poputchik, or “fellow-traveller,” Trotsky’s term for an intellectual who supported the goals of the revolution but was not a Communist Party member. Fellow-travellers weren’t loved, but they were tolerated—for now.

  As a member of World Literature’s editorial planning board, Zamyatin edited and introduced several volumes by H. G. Wells, whose “mechanical, chemical fairy tales” for the age of aeroplanes and asphalt he adored. When Wells visited Petrograd in 1920, Zamyatin gave a speech at the banquet in his honour. In his 1922 essay “H. G. Wells,” Zamyatin understood, as Orwell did not, that Wells’s grand schemes were merely a shaky bridge suspended over an abyss of chaos and violence. “Most of his social fantasies bear the – sign, not the + sign,” Zamyatin wrote. “His sociofantastic novels are almost solely instruments for exposing the defects of the existing social order, rather than building a picture of a future paradise.” Wells therefore used “the murky colours of Goya,” not (apart from Men Like Gods) “the sugary, pinkish colours of a utopia.”

  The essay also revealed an encyclopedic knowledge of utopias and science fiction, from Bacon and Swift to recent, Wells-influenced work from the likes of Czechoslovakia’s Karel Čapek (whose dystopian play R.U.R., admired by Orwell, gave us the word robot), Poland’s Jerzy Żuławski and Russia’s own Aleksey Tolstoy. Zamyatin made the briefest possible reference to a book that his readers wouldn’t have known because it had not yet been (and never would be) approved by the Soviet censors: “We, by the author of this essay.”

  It’s difficult to say whether Orwell took ideas straight from Zamyatin or was simply thinking along similar lines. His description of D-530 as “a poor conventional creature, a sort of Utopian Billy Brown of London Town” could apply to Winston Smith, but also to Flory, Comstock and Bowling. And if the Thought Police resemble the Guardians, then isn’t that because both are extreme versions of Russia’s secret police? At a time when Stalin was nicknamed “Uncle Joe,” did it take the Benefactor to inspire Big Brother? But the “strange and irritating” I-330, who smokes, drinks, enjoys sex, and arranges clandestine rendezvous, does feel like a forerunner of Julia. S-4711, the mysterious hunchback who seems to gaze into D-530’s mind, plays an O’Brien-like role. And D-530’s final surrender strikes the same note as Winston’s love of Big Brother. Remember that Orwell wrote his outline before he read We, but Julia, O’Brien, Big Brother and the Thought Police all came later.

  Even if Orwell took parts of his fictional chassis from Zamyatin, though, his philosophical engine was completely different. When the Benefactor says that people have always “wanted someone, anyone, to tell them once and for all what happiness is—and then to attach them to this happiness with a chain,” he sounds like Mustapha Mond in Brave New World and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, who famously argued that the loss of freedom is a price people will pay for happiness. Orwell rejected this idea. When Winston imagines that O’Brien will justify the Party’s iron rule with the Inquisitor’s argument that “the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness,” he is punished for his stupidity. The citizens of Oceania are neither free nor happy. Equality and scientific progress, so crucial to We, have no place in Orwell’s static, hierarchical dictatorship; organised deceit, so fundamental to Nineteen Eighty-Four, did not preoccupy Zamyatin.

  From another Dostoevsky novel, Notes from Underground, Zamyatin took the equation 2 x 2 = 4 to represent the “stone wall” of rationality. Dostoevsky’s narrator insists on the freedom to say otherwise: “After twice two is four, of course there’ll be nothing left, not only to do but even to discover.” Again, Orwell said the opposite. In the face of mysticism and calculated insanity, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” For Zamyatin and Dostoevsky, the simplest of sums was a cage; for Orwell, it was an anchor. The two world views just don’t align. It’s revealing that Orwell zeroed in on a brief, dissonant note of atavistic cruelty: the Machine of the Benefactor, which reduces enemies of the state to a puddle of liquid in a public “Celebration of Justice.” Orwell detected in this ritual a little of what intrigued him about Jack London: “It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a leader who has divine attributes—that makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s.”

  Orwell told Warburg that We “seems to me to form an interesting link in the chain of Utopia books.” Let’s pause for a moment to follow that chain.

  There are critics who insist that Ayn Rand could have written her 1938 novella Anthem without ever having read We, and good luck to them. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that she came up with the secret diarist Equality 7-2521, the gleaming, uniform City, the rigid timetable, the state hymns, the compulsory happiness, the hard, angular love interest, the escape to the Uncharted Forest, and the tension between I and we: “the monster which hung as a black cloud over the earth and hid the sun from man.” Perhaps it’s simply bad luck that Anthem feels like a crude cover version of a strange and beautiful song.

  Rand fled Russia in 1926, at the age of twenty, and took with her to America a burning, lifelong hatred of communism. She wrote Anthem in three weeks in the summer of 1937, claiming that she had first imagined “a world of the future where they don’t have the word ‘I’ ” while at school in Russia. Snubbed in the US, the novella was published first in Britain, where Malcolm Muggeridge in The Daily Telegraph called it “a grisly forecast of the future . . . a cri de coeur after a surfeit of doctrinaire intolerance.”

  In a letter to her publisher, Rand wrote, “It is so very personally mine, it is in a way, my manifesto, my profession of faith. The essence of my entire philosophy.” Her militant anti-communism meant that her oppressive, collectivist society couldn’t be as technologically advanced as Zamyatin’s; it had to be a primitive, inept paper tyranny, easily outwitted by Equality 7-2521. Escaping to the Uncharted Forest, he renames himself Prometheus and delivers the “anthem” of the title: a bombastic rant about his own exceptionalism and his plan to build an even bigger city than the one he has left behind. This is We rewritten as a capitalist creation myth, with paradise as a building site. “To be free, a man must be free of his brothers,” he concludes. “That is freedom. This and nothing else.” The book’s working title was Ego.

  Rand proceeded to sell millions of novels, found a school of political thought called Objectivism, and shape the ideology of more politicians than any other twentieth-century novelist, so it’s likely that more people took plot points from her book than from We. In George Lucas’s 1971 debut feature THX 1138, an engineer with an alphanumeric name escapes from a spotlessly regimented subterranean society (“Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy”) and emerges alone beneath an unfamiliar sun. Lucas’s desire to represent “the way I see LA right now; maybe a slight exaggeration” produced a satirical twist on Rand’s ineffectual state: robot police officers abandon their mission to apprehend THX because they’ve gone over budget. “It’s the idea that we are all living in cages and the doors are wide open and all we have to do is walk out,” Lucas explained.

  There’s no ambiguity about where the Canadian rock band Rush got the idea for their 1976 concept album 2112, which they released on Anthem Records and dedicated to “the genius of Ayn Rand.” Lyricist Neil Peart called it an attack on “any collectivist mentality.” In the elephantine title track, a citizen of the despotic Solar Federation discovers an ancient guitar, and thus the lost art of rock ’n’ roll. That idea resurfaced in the dystopian kitsch of Ben Elton and Queen’s 2002 hit musical We Will Rock You: a band of rock ’n’ roll rebels, the Bohemians, take up instruments against the Globalsoft Corporation, which anaesthetises the population of Earth (aka iPlanet) with a homogenous commercial culture which includes computer-generated music much like the pab
lum manufactured by Zamyatin’s Music Factory. Globalsoft’s Achilles heel, it transpires, is the music of Queen.

  Capitalism is also, somewhat ironically for a film based on a toy brand, satirised in The Lego Movie. The opening sequence, in which the inhabitants of the automated society of Bricksburg start a typical day, is a version of Zamyatin’s Table of Hours (“Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the exact same hour, at the exact same minute, we, the millions, rise as one. At the exact same hour, we uni-millionly start work and uni-millionly stop work”), but here the routine includes a trip to a Starbucks-style coffee chain. Bricksburg’s answer to “The Hymn of the One State” is the fanatically upbeat “Everything Is Awesome.” Like We, the movie deploys an obedient technician who stumbles into rebellion (Emmet Brickowski), a female revolutionary (Wyldstyle), a dictator (President Business) and the construction of a super-weapon (the Kragle) in a story which promotes individual imagination over the ersatz happiness of conformity—Revolution over Entropy—via the use of plastic bricks.

  This winding path from Lenin to Lego illustrates that anti-utopian narratives have the flexibility and portability of myths. It is not always clear who read what and when, and the changes usually outweigh the resemblances. Take THX 1138, for example. Lucas seems to have taken his narrative arc from Zamyatin or Rand, his mind-controlling drugs from Huxley, and his telescreens and mysterious godlike ruler from Orwell, not to mention ideas from Metropolis, Things to Come and Jean-Luc Godard’s sci-fi noir Alphaville, but sieved this broth of influences through the culture of 1970s America, and his own considerable visual imagination, to produce a dystopia with its own distinctive flavour. And of course Zamyatin himself was reworking existing material. His blue-uniformed ciphers, ubiquitous Guardians, and violent rebellion in a city of glass all had precedents in Wells, notably The Sleeper Awakes and “A Story of the Days to Come.” Another twist: while declining to acknowledge We, Rand suggested that Orwell had plagiarised her. When she revised Anthem for its US hardback debut in 1953, she downplayed the horrors of the collectivist state lest she “give readers the impression that Anthem is merely another sordid story on the order of Orwell’s 1984 (which, incidentally, was written many years after Anthem had been published in England).”