On the Relevance of Zamiatin
Exactly one hundred years ago, Evgeny Zamiatin wrote his famous novel, We. Visionary dystopian novel that looks with chilling precision back to all sorts of Utopias and dreams, and to the future, to the scary world of total scientific and rational control over society.
All sorts of Western and Russian intellectuals were more than happy to alert us that that this novel is about "them," i.e. those damn Russkies and Commies.
Oh, look how awful, look at those numbers/ciphers marching under the order of their Benefactor. Isn't it a perfect emblem of nasty old Stalinism? Huxley, Orwell, Ayn Rand, cynically or inadvertently, used Zamiatin brilliant imagery to sell their stories to the western public, which was more than happy to pat itself on the back. See, it is all about them, not us!
When they make people denounce each other, it is about them. When they have all those guardians worrying about community standards it is about them. When they claim that we want to liberate society from its retrograde passions and emotions, from family and poetry, from quirkiness and originality, and organize it scientifically — it is all about them, not us.
When the rules of eugenics applied throughout, so that a short woman can't have a child from her lover, it is about them. When there is so called Benefactor Machine that evaporates (read deplatforms, bans, wipes out) people, it is about them. When all citizens, exposed to the wild outside world that thrives on animal instincts, are subjected to the so called Great Operation (notice the medical terminology) , that immediately straitens them out and makes them listless and emotionless, so that they can watch the torture of their lover under the Benefector's Bell with total indifference — it is about them.
When human identity is reduced to a number, to a cog in the machine, and the most primitive rationality and scientism is drilled into people from early childhood to give them the sense of superiority over all those wild irrational, passionate, and self-destructive people — it is all about them, not us, who are superior beings enjoying our freedoms under democracy. We don't have Benefectors. We have democratically elected leaders.
Well, the old Revolutionary and Marxist, Zamiatin, was responding mostly to what he saw in Newcastle where he worked as an engineer, and to the writings of H.G. Wells, where all sorts of Utopias are proposed to save mankind from itself.
So people like Orwell, immediately understood what Zamiatin is talking about, but failed to do anything with it, or with the way Orwell's own writings were deliberately misread as the brilliant criticism of them, of their, and not our totalitarianism.
What a sweet little myth! Zamiatin, however, was a man of the world. A true visionary. Stupid Soviet party apparatchiks could have used his rebellious writings against the stifling West, in the same way as they could have used modernist art, music, poetry, passions and emotions against the stifling west. But they were even more limited and myopic than western propagandists. They had such a weapon on their hands, instead they simply kicked Zamiatin out, as they did plenty of other great artists and visionaries, delivering them to the west, which got hold of them and used them for its own cynical and brainwashing purposes.
Except the great art continues to be a double edged sword. Zamiatin's and Orwell's chicken are coming home to roost. Sooner or later people would figure out that these giants were writing about us, not them.
