We and totalitarianism, the story of Zamyatin

Totalitarian terror is random. Nothing - not even an upside-down world, a twisted world, a world that rewards the absence of soul and values ​​the death of nature - is as terrifying as a world without any meaning.

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Zamyatin, Photo: Printscreen YouTube
Zamyatin, Photo: Printscreen YouTube
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

For years, I've kept one item in a place of honor in every home I've lived in: it's a kind of wall ornament, a daily class schedule handwritten on glass. Among other things, eight and a half hours are provided for sleeping, and one hour each for breakfast, lunch and dinner; half an hour is designated for physical exercises, while three hours are intended for staying in the fresh air and social games after dinner. Someone swiped that beautiful item from a psychiatric clinic in the Russian hinterland and brought it to me as a gift. I never get tired of watching it, while my daughter often repeats the entry "rest time: 14-16". It is wonderful to stretch an hour of rest into two - to subvert the passage of time.

Every year when I read the novel "We" with my students Yevgenija Zamyatin, I want to bring the timetable from psychiatry into the classroom, because Zamyatin's world in that book is imagined as a strictly organized life, while also seeming to undermine the passage of time. Born in 1884, Zamyatin was a revolutionary, a true Bolshevik; in imperial Russia he was arrested and sent into internal exile; he then spent some time in England and returned only a month before the Bolsheviks would take over. He wrote his dystopia three years later, while he made the final changes probably in 1921 or '22. By then, the Bolsheviks had already imposed censorship and established their own secret police. It took them several years to establish Soviet rule over most of the Russian Empire, nationalize most private property, and build the first concentration camp. The reign of terror will take a little more time. Zamyatin wrote a novel that predicts many details of that and other terrors that will occur in the 20th century.

If you have heard of the novel "We", you have heard that it predicted the future and paved the way for the genre, that it influenced Huxley i Orwell whose dystopian novels shaped our understanding of the 20th century. "We" describes the One State where people do not have personal names; they were marked with a combination of letters and numbers, as prisoners of Nazi camps. They wear identical clothes, have uniform hairstyles, their food is synthetic and extremely utilitarian, and their houses are the same and transparent. (Soviet life, with forced uniformity on the one hand, and extreme scarcity on the other, was a less aesthetically pleasing version of such a flattened existence). People live according to a centralized schedule that reminds me of my psychiatry class schedule, which sets a time for everything, including making love with a partner assigned by a central authority. They speak in twisted language; a tyrant is called a Benefactor. At the center of community life is a public execution that is celebrated and perfected: human life is reduced to a little pure water and ashes. Zamyatin described it 20 years before Nazi Germany began its sanitary, industrial mass extermination of people reduced to numbers. Zamyatin's dystopia is a walled and vaulted city, and its inhabitants are unaware that there is another world outside. He wrote it years before the Soviet Union closed itself behind the Iron Curtain.

Although Zamyatin wrote this book several years before the word "totalitarianism" appeared in the political vocabulary, and a full three decades before political theorists defined and described it, he predicted many of its features; he predicted its basic condition, the destruction of the individual. In Sources of Totalitarianism and Other Texts, Hannah Arendt states that totalitarianism is a new form of government that differs from previous tyrannies. The tyrants of the past demanded obedience - the outward manifestation of certain behavior - while totalitarian regimes tend to absorb, to nullify the core of the human being. Obedience is not enough, nor is the manifestation of love; the regime requires both that and everything else. The contours of one's own self disappear, and people merge into what Arendt called "one man of enormous dimensions." Zamyatin found one word for it: mi.

The novel could not be published in the Soviet Union. It was translated into English in 1924, then into Czech and French. A few years after the Czech edition, Zamyatin - at that time a writer of repute, president of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Writers - will condemn every magazine and publishing house in the USSR. He stepped down and became a pariah. He emigrated to Paris in 1931, with special permission. By that moment, namely, the Soviet borders had already been practically sealed.

It's all clear and quite logical. Contemporary Russian literary critic Dmitry Bykov, however, claims that Zamyatin's predictions were wrong. "He was afraid of the wrong thing," Bykov said in a lecture in 2016: "He described a perfectly totalitarian state, built on absolute reason, on logic, and its forced totalitarian benevolence." Zamyatin's dystopia was pure, sterile, perfect - therefore soulless and soulless. And in fact, Bikov continues, the totalitarianism of the last century was not so terrible because of the tyranny of perfection, but because of the tyranny of the worst.

Of course, the horrors of the twentieth century were, as the philosopher put it Zygmunt Bauman, functions of modernity. The Holocaust was realized with the help of railways, precise layout and technology that enabled mass, anonymized murders. Zamyatin was not only a man of imagination, but also of science; trained as an engineer and worked in shipbuilding, as one of the creators of the gigantic Russian icebreaker. He knew very well how technology can affect human existence, and that, perhaps, enabled him to imagine people reduced to numbers, and then to a handful of ashes. What he did not foresee, notes Bikov, is the irresistible call of the worst in human nature, the very call that connects the darkest moments of the 20th century with autocrats and those who aspire to be autocrats in the 21st century. To those who call their followers to reject all conventions of dignity and expectations of morality and together be the worst versions of themselves.

There were enough similarities between the regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for scholars to describe a new category that encompasses them: totalitarianism. Both regimes relied on propaganda and terror; both treated their populations as consumable goods. There is, however, one significant difference that haunts us even today: while Hitler openly addressed the worst in people, the Bolsheviks built their country in the name of great, humane ideas. The Bolsheviks envisioned a state where everyone is perfectly equal, where everyone receives according to their needs, contributes according to their abilities, and everyone lives in perfect harmony with others. Zamyatin's dystopia is consistent with those ideas and predicts their perversion. As the son of an Orthodox priest and a Russian revolutionary, Zamyatin had a deep understanding and even love for the ideals of communitarianism. When he imagined the nasty outcome of the ruthless realization of those ideas, he described it with an expression that he must have considered a wonderful word - mi.

In a world without personal boundaries, deviations, conflicts, coincidences, differences - in a world without "me" - there can be no "us". We in "We" is a mass, not a community of people. Zamyatin predicted that the totalitarian subject who starts to realize his wishes, instead of following the established schedule and fulfilling the orders of the Benefactor, is undesirable here. He will have to be repaired, executed or banished. In the novel, the protagonist named D-503 is found to have developed a soul - a condition that must be remedied immediately in order to reintegrate into society.

Stalin and Lenin
Stalin and Leninphoto: Printscreen YouTube

And the story of Zamyatin sounds like that. After the novel "We" was published abroad, he was excluded from all Soviet institutions, and in the end he was forced to beg Stalin for permission to emigrate. That's the story I've outlined here: it sounds good, but it's not entirely true. Zamyatin's loss of professional and social status preceded the printing of the translation, and probably took place even before the novel itself was finished. In a 1921 essay titled “I'm Afraid,” he wrote about what he saw as the emerging Soviet system for selecting ideologically eligible writers who were allowed to publish. He classified the writers into "agile" and "non-agile" and pointed out that the latter group is being silenced - these are those who are unable to precisely align their words with the expectations of the new regime:

"True literature develops when it is written not only by obedient and reliable bureaucrats, but also by madmen, renegades, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics. Where the writer must be reasonable, faithful as a Catholic, useful for the current moment, where he must not lash out at everyone as Jonathan Swift, nor to smile at everything like Anatole France, there can be no literature carved in bronze for eternity - but only that on roto-paper that is read today, and tomorrow is used to wrap bakaluk."

Zamyatin rightly believed that his texts would be long-lasting. He fought, asked for favors from influential friends and published thanks to their interventions. For three years he worked on a theater piece that he believed would restore his reputation. In 1928, the play "Attila" was approved for reading before the artistic council of the great Leningrad Drama Theater. Representatives of 18 city factories attended; the workers were then the ultimate authority in every field, including the arts.

The audience liked the drama. One worker noted that the play's ancient class struggle reflects contemporary reality. "Ideologically, this play is quite acceptable", concluded the factory worker: "The drama is very impressive and breaks with the idea that modern theater does not produce good works." Another factory worker compared Zamyatin to Shakespeare and said: "The play is tragic, full of action and will hold the audience's attention." The third worker assessed that "all the roles in the drama are strong and impressive". Today we would say that the criticism was enthusiastic. In the era of state censorship, reviews were replaced by closed previews. Zamyatin believed that he had succeeded, that the Soviet Union would recognize him as one of its own and that he would be allowed to serve the regime as a writer.

And then the regional censorship service decided to ban "Atila". Did Zamyatin realize that the ban had nothing to do with the content or style of his writing? Did he know that writers, like all other people, are subject to random terror? Did he realize that his ideologically perfect offer was rejected precisely because totalitarianism does not require transactional obedience, but demands unconditional surrender? Apparently not.

It is perfectly logical to think that "We" is banned from the press because it talks about some aspects of Soviet totalitarianism. However, Zamyatin, who worked for many years as a shipbuilding engineer in England, saw his work as a warning intended for all of modernity: it was a warning about the dangers of Fordism as much as the rigid implementation of a socialist utopia. The book was rejected not because, in the eyes of the authorities, it misrepresented the Soviet Union, but because it was wrong for the Soviet Union - as was Zamyatin himself. The system was expelling him and didn't owe him any explanation for that.

Fate made him both the original writer on totalitarianism and one of its original victims. In the novel "We", Zamyatin predicts the tyranny of rationality, a world of merciless causality in which every action is assigned its predictable consequence. Work leads to progress. Progress leads to happiness. Children are born from sex. A misdemeanor results in death. Even as Zamyatin's imagined totalitarianism collapses, that collapse is a logical consequence. Breaking through the wall leads to more lives. Soul development destroys harmony. Amputation of the soul restores happiness. If only things were that simple.

Totalitarian terror is random. Nothing - not even an upside-down world, a twisted world, a world that rewards the absence of soul and values ​​the death of nature - is as terrifying as a world without any meaning. Real terror is carried out by making everyone believe that at any moment they can be arrested, convicted, beaten, raped, killed - punished for anything and everything, without reason, warning or right to appeal. What precisely places the novel "We" in the era in which it was actually written, which in a certain sense confirms our perception of time, is the fact that in 1920 Zamyatin could not yet imagine the tyranny of chaos. Despite all his insights into the future, he couldn't fathom what was happening to him at that moment.

When his play "Attila" was rejected in 1928, and a public shaming campaign began the following year due to the foreign publication of the novel "We", Zamyatin lost all hope. It was completely canceled in the Soviet Union. None of his plays were produced. His collected works were taken off the printing press. Even his translations and professional reviews, prepared for the press, were cancelled. Finally, he lost the last place in the committees and the proofreading stalls. As he stated in his letter to Stalin, Zamyatin was condemned to "literary death": nothing he wrote would be published and he would not be allowed to play even an episodic role in the world of literary production.

He wrote a letter to Stalin in 1931 with the argument that the Soviet criminal code foresees the possibility of replacing the death penalty with banishment from the country. “If I am really a criminal and deserve to be punished,” he wrote, “I would venture to suggest that my punishment should not be so severe as literary death. Therefore, I ask that my sentence be reduced to banishment outside the borders of the USSR, and that my wife be allowed to join me. And if it turns out that I'm not a criminal, then I ask that I be allowed to return to our literature, at least after a year, to serve big ideas instead of small people."

He lived in Paris until his death at the age of 53. It is believed that in 1937, Stalin's Russia carried out the largest number of death sentences. Every Russian expert on Zamyatin feels the need to mention, along with the date of his death, that he died a "natural death", so that there would be no dilemma. He died three years before Nazi Germany would occupy France, four before the beginning of the Holocaust. The Soviet Great Purge was already underway, and he apparently hoped to the end that he would return, to be a writer at home. Little did he know that the loneliness and lostness he felt in the 1920s—the persistent impression that nothing made sense and the obsessive need to find reason in meaninglessness—were real, quintessential experiences of totalitarianism. The feeling of non-existence pervades the novel "We", but it is an expected non-existence conditioned by the rules. There is no random, punitive, inconceivable non-existence in the book, perhaps because Zamyatin could not yet imagine it at the time - or, perhaps, because he could never imagine it, even while living it. "We" is thus simultaneously a monument to the potential of human imagination and its limits. Zamyatin could imagine a nightmare that didn't exist, but not the one he lived in.

(Excerpt from the preface to the new edition of Zamjatin's novel "We"; The New Yorker; translated by Milica Jovanović, Peščanik.net)

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