Dennis Biba

It is the first book to be officially banned in the Soviet Union. Three years previously, Zamyatin had fought on the side of the Bolsheviks in the February and October Revolutions and was considered a harsh critic of the Russian Empire, but the horrors of the revolution soon dashed all illusions of a better future. Even though his novel We (original: Мы) does not read today as a clear criticism of the Soviet Union, but rather takes into account various influences, the Bolsheviks obviously found it too critical when it was published in 1920. Zamyatin was forced into exile in England. His novel was published abroad in various versions and soon became very well known outside the Soviet Union. Writers such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell were significantly influenced by Zamyatin and are today considered by many – wrongly – to be the inventors of the dystopian novel.

But what is in such a slim book that could bring an entire world empire to its knees? The scenario that Zamyatin paints could not be more fitting given the backdrop of the First World War: a 200-year war has drastically reduced the human population. The survivors have joined together in the One State, a city-state protected from the wilderness outside by a glass wall. Almost everything in the One State is made of glass: the wall, the streets, the houses – only love life is separated from the view of the neighbors by a privacy curtain – and the citizens of the One State are also completely transparent thanks to the zealous surveillance by the (not-so-)secret service. One of them: the protagonist D-503, designer of the Integral, the spaceship that is supposed to bring the One State closer to the peoples of space. But the holy mission is under threat, because among the loyal citizens and outside the wall, revolutionary forces are already secretly planning the overthrow.

Whether the novel was actually intended as a critique of the Bolsheviks is something that could be debated for a long time. On the one hand, Zamyatin’s classless, uniform and collectivist society reduces the communist utopia to absurdity and counters it with radical individualism. On the other hand, Russia, which had been very little industrialized until then, can hardly have provided a model for the Taylorist industrial state that he describes in We. In this respect at least, England seems to have served as his role model. Is the protector of the One State, that almost superhuman Messiah, ultimately a metaphor for the invisible hand of the free market? At least there can be no talk of freedom in We, neither of the market, since the economy is centrally controlled and knows no competition, nor of the citizens, who are freed from the burden of any free decision. Happiness, according to the maxim of the One State, always goes hand in hand with lack of freedom, since people long not to have to take responsibility for their own actions. As provocative as this thesis may sound, it could be argued that we are much freer today, but not necessarily happier than the citizens of Zamyatin’s fictional state. Or is the text leading us into a trap? In order to write utopias, whether credible or implausible, a good dose of progressiveness is required. This is not necessary for anti-utopias or dystopias, because for conservatives future always looks bleak. And so, as with Orwell’s 1984, the question arises what alternative Zamyatin actually offers us to the One State. Beyond the wall there is only the romantic, cheesy idea of life in wild, almost untouched nature and a return to the Christian nuclear family – an aspect that the text does not tell explicitely, but which is at least implied by the contrast with state-enforced polyamory. And so this undoubtedly great novel should also be enjoyed with a certain degree of caution.