The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Moore’s long list of influences, published in Warrior, included the dystopian trinity of Orwell, Huxley and Bradbury alongside Judge Dredd, The Prisoner, David Bowie and New Wave science fiction. Lloyd’s illustrations of a grey, debilitated London have an Orwellian flavour, as do the regime’s slogans, “Strength Through Purity, Purity Through Faith” and—more unnerving now than it was then—“Make Britain Great Again.” As in Airstrip One, the heritage of literature and music has been eradicated; only in V’s Shadow Gallery can the voices of the past, from Shakespeare to Motown, still be heard. Moore’s obviously deep knowledge of the genre produces at least one very good joke. Norsefire Television’s hit drama serial follows the racist adventures of Aryan action man Storm Saxon in the “nightmarish future England” of 2501. So this is what the rulers of a dystopia consider dystopian.

  V for Vendetta was left in limbo when Warrior closed in 1985. By the time Moore and Lloyd revived and completed it for DC in 1988, after nine years of Thatcher, they were able to scrutinise their earlier predictions. Moore decided that he had been too optimistic in thinking that “it would take something as melodramatic as a near-miss nuclear conflict to nudge England towards fascism.” He now thought that it wouldn’t be that difficult at all.

  Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin in the spring of 1984. Like Orwell when he began Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was in her early forties and she knew exactly what she wanted to say. The novel originated with a file of newspaper cuttings she had begun collecting while living in England, covering such topics as the religious right, prisons in Iran, falling birth rates, Nazi sexual politics, polygamy and credit cards. She let these diverse observations ferment, like compost, until a story grew out of them. Her travels in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where she experienced “the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information,” nourished the novel, too, as did her adolescent obsession with dystopias and World War Two. She remembered identifying with Winston because he was “silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him. (This may be one of the reasons 1984 is best read when you are an adolescent: most adolescents feel like that.)” The novel persuaded her that it really could happen to her, even in Canada in the early 1950s. She denied that The Handmaid’s Tale was science fiction, preferring to call it “speculative fiction of the George Orwell variety.”

  The novel is narrated by Offred (i.e., she belongs to Fred), a “handmaid” whose only role in Gilead, a fascistic theocracy brought to power by a chronic fertility crisis and a savage coup, is to bear children for the sterile ruling class.42 The architects of Gilead are utopian fanatics who truly believe they are building a better, happier world. “There is more than one kind of freedom,” the matronly apparatchik Aunt Lydia tells the handmaids. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.” In Newspeak, the word free only means freedom from; the concept of freedom to has ceased to exist.

  Atwood’s appendix, “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale,” combines a homage to “The Principles of Newspeak” with an arch parody of academia: the title that the twenty-second-century scholars give to Offred’s story is a Chaucerian joke. But this is only the last and most obvious of the traces left by Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is a secret diary—narrated to tape rather than written, because the written word is taboo for the women of Gilead—with no guarantee of a reader. There are public hangings, informants, forbidden books (which is to say all books) and the erasure of history. There are “Unwomen” and all-seeing policemen called “Eyes.” There is a ritual of controlled violence called a “Salvaging,” which is like the Two Minutes Hate with blood on its hands. Then again, such ideas came from the real world as much as from Orwell. Atwood had a rule: “I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time.” The appendix mentions Iran, Russia and Romania; Atwood also took monstrous innovations from the Nazis, American slave-owners, South American juntas and Salem witch-hunters. Gilead’s genius, like Oceania’s, is synthesis.

  It comes back to the question of influence. So much of The Handmaid’s Tale is Atwood’s own, from the mordant humour and ringing prose to the engagement with issues of gender, sexuality, race and religious extremism that barely registered with Orwell. He was well aware that totalitarianism weaponised motherhood and sexual puritanism: sexcrime is any activity except “normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman,” which makes Winston and Julia’s coupling “a political act.” But his interest in women’s interior lives, to his detriment as a writer and a person, was minimal.

  What makes Atwood’s Gilead feel truly Orwellian is the climate of paralysing unreality. Offred assumes that the news of distant battles between Gilead and rival religious factions may be faked and that the Mayday resistance movement might, like Orwell’s Brotherhood, not exist. Even her own memories are treacherous—when she tries to picture the faces of her missing husband and daughter, they shrivel like burning photographs. She calls herself “a refugee from the past.” The next generation of women will be happier, more obedient, “Because they will have no memories of any other way.” Like Winston Smith, Offred is no radical; she’s just looking for things to hold on to, before they turn to mist. At least Winston gets to keep his name, though England does not: another name for Airstrip One might be Ofoceania.

  The first fully realised near-future dystopia to focus on the oppression of women, The Handmaid’s Tale sold over one million copies in its first two years. A film, based on a screenplay by Harold Pinter, followed in 1990. Atwood has since regularly been asked if the book was a prediction. Her answer could apply equally to Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Let’s say it’s an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen.”

  Orwell would have turned eighty-one in 1984. All of his friends who granted interviews, addressed conferences or published memoirs in and around that year were north of seventy.43 Even the younger admirers who had first clashed over his legacy in the early 1950s were in their sixties. Their opinions were thus freighted with decades of baggage, and the pressing sense that whoever won this latest battle for Orwell’s imagined blessing would win the war. They were fighting for the validity of their own memories, and the choices they had made, even as some acknowledged the folly of claiming him for any political position. “I understood him up to a point,” V. S. Pritchett told Time. “It was hard to define him because just when you had fixed on a view, he would contradict it.”

  The solution—still popular to this day—was to hold to the light the quotations that supported the writer’s argument and shove the unhelpful ones down the memory hole. But in their heads, these writers were simply insisting on the truth. They identified so intensely with Orwell’s moral integrity and independence of mind that to see him “stolen” by their opponents was to suffer an emotional wound. While a few remnants of 1930s communism were eager to see the back of him (seventy-four-year-old journalist Alaric Jacob called Nineteen Eighty-Four “one of the most disgusting books ever written”) almost all other commentators wanted Saint George on their side and accused each other, with apparently sincere outrage, of gross dishonesty.

  Orwell made it clear that he was a democratic socialist who opposed conservatives as well as communists, so the most inflammatory reputation grab was a 1983 Harper’s cover story called “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” by the leading American neoconservative Norman Podhoretz. “Normally, to speculate on what a dead man might have said about events he never lived to see is a frivolous enterprise,” he acknowledged, before gamely pressing on to insist that an octogenarian Orwell would have said that Norman Podhoretz was right. Given that the neocon think tank Committee for the Free World had already christened its publishing arm the Orwell Press,
any other conclusion would have been inconvenient. The pugnacious British socialist Christopher Hitchens retaliated with his own arsenal of quotations to “prove” that Orwell would still be a democratic socialist who took a dim view of “the sort of well-heeled power worshiper who passes for an intellectual these days.” The tug-of-war continued for months and was, of course, unwinnable. National Review, the conservative journal cofounded by James Burnham, applauded Orwell, but so did the left-wing novelist E. L. Doctorow and the civil libertarians behind The 1984 Calendar: An American History. Democrats and Republicans alike cited Nineteen Eighty-Four in fundraising letters during the 1984 presidential election campaign.

  Another battlefront opened up in the pages of the British press, where Tribune published a series of essays about its most famous alumnus. Nineteen Eighty-Four was plainly anti-socialist, insisted conservatives Peregrine Worsthorne and Alfred Sherman. No, it wasn’t, countered Bernard Crick and Tony Benn. On New Year’s Eve, the leaders of Britain’s three main political parties all mentioned the book in their New Year messages. Margaret Thatcher declared that 1984 would be “a year of hope and a year of liberty,”and therefore “George Orwell was wrong,” even as Labour’s Neil Kinnock published an essay in the London Times which defended the novel from the “tomb-robbers” of the right. The Sun, precisely the kind of tabloid newspaper that Orwell loathed, retorted that in fact Kinnock’s own party was Ingsoc in embryo: if Labour had won the 1983 general election under the “Marxist” Michael Foot, Orwell’s erstwhile Tribune colleague, “we would have been taken so far down the path to the Corporate State, there could have been no turning back.” But—phew!—Britain had been spared this Orwellian nightmare by Margaret Thatcher. The Sun’s “20 Things You Never Knew About George Orwell” contrived not to mention the word socialism once.

  The Spectator’s Paul Johnson observed that this “ideological overkill” could only result in a tie: “since everyone, Left, Right and Centre, can and does hijack the wretched man for every conceivable political purpose, the net result is almost exactly nil.” Still, nobody considered the possibility that the ranks of those attempting to appropriate Orwell would include Russian propagandists.

  In an obviously coordinated effort, three prominent Soviet journals published articles claiming that Orwell was really satirising the West, whether he knew it or not. Novoye Vremya presented Nineteen Eighty-Four as “a grim warning to bourgeois-democratic society, which, as he pointed out, is rooted in anti-humanism, all-devouring militarism and denial of human rights.” Literaturnaya Gazeta explained that Ronald Reagan was Big Brother, the telescreens were the National Security Agency, and Airstrip One was manifest in the siting of American nuclear weapons at Britain’s Greenham Common. Izvestiya said that history had turned Oceania into “a fully realistic picture of contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism.”

  These writers could have claimed that the novel took place on Mars for all that most of their readers knew, because only the party elite could legally access a copy, just as only the Inner Party can lay hands on Goldstein’s book. On the black market, it cost two-thirds of the average monthly salary. In a spectacular example of Soviet doublethink, this revisionism coincided with the trial of Latvian translator Gunārs Astra, who was sentenced to seven years in the gulag for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”—crimes which included circulating a samizdat copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  It was easy for Margaret Thatcher or Steve Jobs to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a bad guess, but for some readers, it was a startlingly detailed anatomy of a system they knew intimately. “No one has ever lived in Lilliput, etc.,” wrote Conor Cruise O’Brien, “but hundreds of millions of people live today under political conditions quite closely comparable to the essentials of Orwell’s picture.” That included Iran, China and North Korea, but the book had particular cachet in the Soviet bloc. During his travels in Eastern Europe, the journalist Timothy Garton Ash regularly met underground Orwell fans who asked, “How did he know?” Well, he knew because he paid attention. He observed communist behaviour in Spain, he listened to exiles, he read every book he could. And his efforts were appreciated. In Utopia in Power, Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich described Orwell as “probably the single Western author who understood the nature of the Soviet world.”

  The arrival of 1984 therefore unleashed a flood of memories. The Lithuanian émigré Tomas Venclova, who read a clandestine copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the early 1960s and related the story to his friends as if it were a folk tale, said that it had changed his life: “He was the first person to explain to me that a normal person cannot live in that society.” In his introduction to a new Czech samizdat edition (read aloud by Pinter at Thoughtcrimes), Milan Šimečka recalled a similar epiphany: “When I read the story of Winston Smith, I received a shock because I realised all of a sudden that this was my own story I was reading . . . Wherever I go, whatever I hear on our radio and television, I am reminded of the London of 1984.” So while some left-wing critics in the West accused Orwell of misanthropy and defeatism, many people who woke up to totalitarianism every day found the book inspirational, because they felt understood: they were used to being watched, but not seen. Šimečka compared his reading experience to Winston’s reaction to Goldstein’s book: “The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.” Hungary’s György Dalos published a bitterly witty sequel called 1985, in which the revolutionaries of the “London spring” overthrow Ingsoc before being suppressed, just like their real-world predecessors in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four became such a cliché among the Iron Curtain intelligentsia that Milan Kundera grew to hate it. Kundera’s famous line “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” may sound like something from Orwell, but he thought that the novel encouraged his Czech friends to see their life as “an undifferentiated block of horrors.” Even life under Soviet rule was not quite as bad as Oceania, he insisted. Hadn’t they still enjoyed, despite everything, art, jokes, friendship, love? All the stubborn pleasures of life that can’t be reduced to politics? “In their talk of forty horrible years,” he complained, “they were all Orwellising their recollection of their own lives.”

  By the time Kundera published those words, in 1993, Eurasia had fallen.

  It’s often forgotten that Orwell did not agree with O’Brien on the subject of totalitarianism’s invincibility, and maintained in his journalism that the system contained the seeds of its own downfall. The Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik agreed. In 1970, he published a much-discussed essay called “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” (He originally chose 1980 as the date of collapse, but a friend convinced him to adopt the Orwellian deadline instead.) For the sin of writing it, Amalrik served five years in the gulag and later died in exile. Come 1984, one of his friends was taunted in prison by KGB officers: “Amalrik is long dead, but we are still very much present.” In hindsight, Amalrik wasn’t wrong about the USSR’s fatal weaknesses, just premature. By 1984, argued the veteran Yugoslavian socialist Milovan Djilas, totalitarianism had effectively disintegrated, leaving nothing more than “a ritualistic code.” The language of that code was known as Novoyaz: Newspeak.44 Power without belief did not, as O’Brien believes, mean perfection. It meant decay. Without ideology and terror, the Soviet regime was no longer totalitarian; without totalitarianism, it could not endure.

  In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist government asked the seasoned sociologist Yuri Levada to mastermind an unprecedented study of Russian public opinion. Levada took the opportunity to explore his own theories about the kind of human being that had been created by decades of isolation, paternalism and conformity: Homo Sovieticus. To describe the contradictory thoughts required of the average Russian, obliged to believe in progress and equality while experiencing neither, Levada turned to Orwell and double-think. Answers to his questionnaire confirmed his hypothesis that most Soviet citizens were only pretending to belie
ve in communism: everybody knew the steps so well that they kept dancing even when they could no longer hear the music. Thirty years later, the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen summarised Levada’s findings about Homo Sovieticus in The Future Is History: “His inner world consisted of antinomies, his objective was survival, and his strategy was constant negotiation—the endless circulation of games and doublethink.” In Orwell’s terms, Homo Sovieticus was Julia: “She took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so.”

  Gorbachev’s chief architect of glasnost and perestroika was Aleksandr Nikolaevich Yakovlev. One of Yakovlev’s projects was the lifting of censorship and the publication, for the first time, of books such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and We. In July 1991, he described Russia in terms that new readers of those books would have recognised: “Our society is deeply ill. Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of authorities. We have turned truth into a crime.”

  Five months later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics officially ceased to exist.

  The fall of communism might have been expected to render Nineteen Eighty-Four a period piece like Darkness at Noon or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, but discussion of the book had already pivoted to the subject of the machine. It should be emphasised that Orwell was far less interested in science than Wells, Zamyatin or Huxley were. Although the telescreen is mentioned in the novel no fewer than 119 times, its operation is thinly sketched and it is less effective as a means of control than the old-fashioned tools of policemen and informants, or the almost supernatural power of Big Brother’s eyes. The science of Oceania does not even fill two pages of Goldstein’s book. As the Polish neoconservative Leopold Labedz wrote in Encounter in 1984: “For Orwell the problem was the technology of power rather than the power of technology . . . Big Brother is not a Dalek.” But this was the impotent cry of an old cold warrior. When a teacher in New York assigned the novel to forty-nine adult students in 1982, only one read it as anti-communist; the rest were reminded of the FBI, CIA, Watergate, television and computers. The book was now resonating at different frequencies.