The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  So, rather than thinking of dystopian ideas as the work of individual geniuses, one might compare them to folk songs, forever mutating as they pass between individuals, and between political contexts. “Look at all these things that people built,” Emmet tells President Business in The Lego Movie. “You might see a mess . . . What I see are people, inspired by each other, and by you. People taking what you made and making something new out of it.”

  Much to Ayn Rand’s annoyance, it’s a collective effort.

  Let’s return to Zamyatin at his desk in Petrograd in 1920. What was he trying to say? In “Freedom and Happiness,” Orwell suggested that Zamyatin, writing before Stalin’s ascent, must have been satirising the Machine rather than Bolshevism. Gleb Struve, however, insisted that the writer was speculating on the totalitarian potential of Bolshevik Russia, which was already a single-party dictatorship with an energetic secret police and formidable propaganda operation: “It is important just because it is even more prophetic than topical.” In a 1932 interview, Zamyatin indicated that they were both correct: “This novel is a warning against the twofold danger which threatens humanity: the hypertrophic power of the machines and the hypertrophic power of the State.”

  The paranoia and persecution that Orwell associated with Stalin had already taken hold in Russia by the time Zamyatin wrote We. In his 1922 play The Fires of Saint Dominic, Zamyatin used the Spanish Inquisition to satirise the Red Terror, giving one of his inquisitors a speech with an Orwellian flavour: “if the Church told me that I had only one eye, I would agree even with that, I would believe even that, because, although I well know that I have two eyes, I know even better that the Church cannot make a mistake.” According to the Russian exile Marc Slonim, “Zamyatin simply could not call what he saw around him a revolution: doctrine encrusting the lava of rebellion, the bloodthirsty executions, the stupid regimentation, the creation of ideocracy in lieu of autocracy.”

  Certainly for the Bolshevik censors, the message of We was unacceptable. It would not be published in Zamyatin’s homeland until 1988, half a century after his death. The novel’s provocative title mocked the principle summed up by the proletarian poet Alexander Ilyich Bezymensky: “The collective ‘We’ has driven out the personal ‘I.’ ” Worse, Zamyatin questioned the revolution. In one daring passage, I-330 explains why another revolution is always possible by asking D-530, as a mathematician, to tell her the final number.

  “But, I-330—that is ridiculous. The number of numbers is infinite; which final one do you want?”

  “Well, which final revolution do you want then? There isn’t a final one. Revolutions are infinite.”

  This is Zamyatin the galloping Scythian, with his endless “What next?” He quoted this exchange as the epigraph for “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” a dazzling 1923 essay in which he applied his theory of infinite revolutions to mathematics, physics, art and politics. This was a wonderfully potent idea and one that was anathema to the guardians of the Bolshevik revolution. Even Gorky denounced We as “hopelessly bad, a completely sterile thing. Its anger is cold and dry; it is the anger of an old maid.”

  For the rest of the 1920s, Zamyatin lived with a sword of Damocles dangling over his head. The many hardline critics who considered him a bourgeois counter-revolutionary, guilty of “ridiculing and humiliating the people of October,” were eager to cut the thread. In 1922, Zamyatin was one of scores of intellectuals arrested for undesirable activities and found himself in a cell on the same corridor of the same jail where he had been imprisoned in 1905. He was disappointed when his friends intervened to save him from being deported, so much so that he then officially requested deportation, without success. He knew what was coming. For the next few years, he fulfilled his official duties as a translator, editor and lecturer. He also dabbled fruitlessly in writing scenarios for the motion picture industry, started an epic novel that he would never finish, and wrote a play, Attila, that was barred from theatres. His letters were censored, his articles rejected by literary journals. He had the smell of heresy about him.

  The horizons of Russian literature were narrowing fast. After Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin, not Trotsky, took his place, fellow-travellers were regarded with increasing suspicion. Gorky spent most of the decade abroad, unable to cushion the blows. In 1925, a group of hardliners led by the Marxist critic Leopold Averbakh formed the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), whose third-rate scribes thrived by denouncing the politically unreliable and grinding out propagandistic dross like Minimus the pig in Animal Farm. As Orwell wrote, “certain themes cannot be celebrated in words and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.” This was the mentality that Zamyatin had already mocked in his 1921 essay “Paradise”: “They all merge into a single monophonic grayness . . . And, indeed, how else? After all, rejecting banality means standing out from the orderly ranks, violating the law of universal equality. Originality is unquestionably criminal.” In the summer of 1928, he and Boris Pilnyak, the novelist who ran the Moscow branch of the VSP, were among several writers dispatched to collective farms to write inspiring fiction about the need to accelerate grain collection. The muse did not strike.

  In December 1928, the Central Committee announced what amounted to a Five Year Plan for literature. Only the writer who celebrated “socialist construction” qualified as a true Soviet writer, and that writer certainly wasn’t Zamyatin. “Everything was levelled, equalised,” he wrote. “Everything vanished in the smoke of the literary carnage.” Gorky privately joked: “In the old days, Russian writers only had the policeman and the archbishop to fear; today’s Communist official is both at once. He is always wanting to lay his filthy paws on your soul.” Averbakh, a calculating demagogue whose brother-in-law was the future NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda, was determined to demolish the fellow-travellers of the VSP by bringing down its leading lights. In 1929, which Hannah Arendt called “the first year of clear-cut totalitarian dictatorship in Russia,” he saw his opportunity.

  We had been published in English, Czech and French, but Zamyatin declined all requests from abroad to publish an edition in the original Russian. Without his permission, however, a group of liberal émigrés in Prague published Russian-language extracts in the magazine Volya Rossii (The Will of Russia) in 1927. Zamyatin asked the editors to desist; they ignored him. Nobody in Russia seemed to care until August 1929, when this unofficial publication was discovered (or handily rediscovered) by RAPP. Pilnyak was similarly vulnerable because his novel Mahogany had been published by émigrés in Berlin. RAPP accused both authors of collaboration and The Literary Gazette printed pages of telegrams attacking them as treacherous bourgeois counter-revolutionaries.

  The Moscow branch of VSP immediately crumpled under pressure, ousting Pilnyak and censuring Zamyatin, who drily noted that if they wanted to attack We, then they should have done it six years earlier, when he read from it at one of their literary evenings. On September 22, the Leningrad VSP held a special general meeting to investigate the publication of We. The hall was so packed that many non-members, intrigued by the Zamyatin affair, were turned away. Read out in his absence, Zamyatin’s explanation of his non-involvement in the Volya Rossii incident persuaded many writers, most of whom had liked and admired him for years, but it was far easier, in that fearful climate, to denounce him anyway. The Russian revolutionary and anti-Stalinist Victor Serge wrote contemptuously that they “voted whatever was required against their two comrades, only to go and ask their pardon in private.” Although the VSP exonerated Zamyatin of active collaboration, it condemned his failure to repudiate “the ideas which were expressed in the novel and which were recognised as anti-Soviet by our public opinion.” So Volya Rossii was just a pretext; We itself was his crime. Zamyatin resigned from the VSP in disgust, just before the entire body was purged, renamed and effectively destroyed. In his resignation letter, he reiterated the particulars of the case in Orwell-like terms: “Facts are
stubborn, they are more stubborn than resolutions. Every fact can be confirmed by documents or people. I want to make these facts known to my readers.”

  Driven to the brink of suicide, Pilnyak recanted his alleged sins so fulsomely and humiliated himself so thoroughly that he became one of the wealthiest writers in 1930s Russia. Zamyatin, however, held fast. “Zamyatin’s crime was that he kept his intellectual independence and moral integrity,” wrote the anti-Stalinist American journalist Max Eastman in Artists in Uniform. “He refused as an artist to take orders from a political bureaucracy.”

  He paid a heavy price for it. Zamyatin’s existing books were withdrawn from publication and pulled from library shelves, and his new work rejected. The Soviet Literary Encyclopedia called We “a mean libel on the Socialist future.” One RAPP critic catalogued his sins: “A complete and unmitigated disbelief in the Revolution, a thorough and persistent scepticism, a departure from reality, an extreme individualism, a clearly hostile attitude to the Marxist-Leninist world view, the justification of any ‘heresy,’ of any protest in the name of protest, [and] a hostile attitude to the factors of class war.”

  In June 1931, further demoralised by chronic colitis, Zamyatin gave Gorky a letter to hand to Stalin, requesting permission to leave Russia. Given his delicate position, his letter was remarkably defiant. He said that he would return to Russia only when “it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men.” Ultimately, he wrote, his blacklisting was a “death sentence”: if he could not write in Russia, then he could not live in Russia.

  Stalin was a capricious man and sometimes spared people, especially artists, for reasons that only he understood. Zamyatin’s request was granted. In November, he left his homeland forever.

  Zamyatin hoped to move to the US to write movies for Cecil B. DeMille, but he never made it. Instead, he settled in Paris, where he and his wife lived a pinched and lonely life. He avoided the city’s numerous White Russian émigrés and declined to become a celebrity ex-communist. As he had told Stalin, “I know that, while I have been proclaimed a right-winger here because of my habit of writing according to my conscience rather than according to command, I shall sooner or later probably be declared a Bolshevik for the same reason abroad.” He worked with little success on short stories, novels, plays, essays and movie scenarios. After a plan to film We fell through, the only scenario that made it to the screen was, aptly enough, an award-winning French adaptation of Gorky’s The Lower Depths for Jean Renoir in 1936.

  Gorky never saw it. He died on June 18, 1936, a disappointment to many.14 When Wells had reconnected with him in Moscow two years earlier, he had been dismayed: “I did not like to find Gorky against liberty. It wounded me.” But Zamyatin, in a powerfully fond obituary, insisted that the old man had thrown a protective force field around many vulnerable writers, including himself: “Dozens of people are indebted to him for their lives and their freedom.”

  Back home, Zamyatin’s friends and foes fell like dominoes. His old Scythian comrade Ivanov-Razumnik spent several years in Moscow jails. RAPP was shut down in 1932. “Nothing remained to mark their reign,” wrote Eugene Lyons in Assignment in Utopia, “except a litter of pronunciamentos and the ashes of artists whom they had hounded to suicide and broken on the rack of persecution.” Zamyatin’s tormentor Leopold Averbakh was arrested and executed in 1937, followed by his brother-in-law, Yagoda. Pilnyak, who once told Victor Serge, “There isn’t a single thinking adult in this country who has not thought that he might get shot,” was accused of being a Japanese spy and killed in 1938. In Stalin’s Russia, there was always somebody more nimble than you. The new literary doctrine, “Soviet realism,” was essentially a form of utopian fiction. Its purpose, observed the American journalist Louis Fischer, was “to treat the present as though it did not exist and the future as if it had already arrived.”

  Orwell appears to have known very little about Zamyatin’s life. Had he known more, had he read We a decade earlier, he might have visited the Russian when he passed through Paris on the way to Spain. A conversation might have accelerated his understanding of Russia and his interest in anti-utopias. But perhaps it would already have been too late. Zamyatin was seriously ill with angina pectoris. Shortly after dawn on March 10, 1937—when the light, as he wrote in We, was “ringing and fizzy”—his heart gave out. He was fifty-three. A small group of friends buried him in the rain. In Russia, his passing made barely a ripple.

  Zamyatin gave the citizens of his One State a choice between painful, chaotic freedom and the mindless happiness of total obedience. For him, as for Orwell, that was never really a choice. He was as stubborn as a fact.

  CHAPTER 7

  Inconvenient Facts

  Orwell 1944–1945

  As soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged.

  —George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” 1945

  Orwell never enjoyed writing a book as much as he enjoyed writing Animal Farm during the foul and foggy winter of 1943–1944. Each night in bed at 10a Mortimer Crescent, he would read the day’s work to Eileen and invite feedback. The next morning, she would quote the best bits to her colleagues at the Ministry of Food when they went for coffee at Selfridge’s. She said, with justified pride, that it was the best thing he had ever written. It flew like an arrow, poison-tipped. The real struggle, Orwell knew, was still to come. “I am writing a little squib which might amuse you when it comes out,” he told Gleb Struve, “but it is so not O.K. politically that I don’t feel certain in advance that anyone will publish it. Perhaps that gives you a hint of its subject.”

  Animal Farm was made possible by Orwell’s much more agreeable work schedule. In short order, he left the BBC, resigned from the Home Guard, and joined Tribune on Monday November 29, 1943, working three days a week as literary editor and author of the column “As I Please.” Founded in 1937 by the Labour MPs Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, Tribune had initially backed Stalin, but under the editorship of Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, who took over in 1942, it had become the organ of the non-communist Labour left, in the unusual position of criticising both Stalin and Churchill. Orwell called it the only weekly paper that made “a genuine effort . . . to combine a radical Socialist policy with a respect for freedom of speech and a civilised attitude towards literature and the arts.” Bevan, the formidably intelligent and pugnacious son of a Welsh coal miner, was the only politician Orwell truly liked and admired, and the respect was mutual.

  Orwell was far too soft to make a good literary editor. He paid struggling writers for articles he had no space to print, and perhaps didn’t even consider worth printing, because he knew what a difference the fee would make to their pinched finances. He defended his drawer stuffed with expensively unpublished manuscripts by saying that’s what happens when you turn a freelance writer into an editor: “It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison.”

  Orwell did, however, excel as a columnist. After years of smuggling his obsessions into reviews or radio programmes, he was finally able to publish whatever was on his mind, from racism, propaganda and freedom of speech to make-up, birdwatching and the price of clocks. The most sombre topics rubbed up against brainteasers, jokes and nuggets of trivia. Orwell had opinions about everything under the sun and they were all worth reading even if you disagreed with them, which many Tribune readers did, loudly and often. Michael Foot, the future Labour MP who sat on the Tribune board, called “As I Please” “the only column ever written in Fleet Street by a man who came into the office deliberately every week with the idea of offending as many readers as possible.”

  “As I Please” was Orwell unfiltered, transmitting his thoughts to the page with a confident, chatty fluidity. He would rehearse his ideas in conversation. Friends such as Tosco Fyvel, his former Searchlight Books colleague, would recognise on the page some of the same phrases that they had heard a few da
ys before. Some of them reappeared in Nineteen Eighty-Four, making “As I Please” a kind of workshop for the novel. In one column, he described the radio as if it were a telescreen: “a sort of totalitarian world of its own, braying propaganda night and day to people who can listen to nothing else.” In another, he recalled meeting a young pacifist painter, on the first night of the Blitz, who insisted that he could weather German occupation with his integrity intact. “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside . . . Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attic the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom.” It was a fallacy that he was to directly refute in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the room above Charrington’s shop is a sanctum that turns out to be a trap. “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world,” says O’Brien, “however secret and powerless it may be.”