A dystopian novel George Orwell "1984", set in an imagined future where a totalitarian government deprives its citizens of everything in order to manage to maintain public support for a senseless and reasonless war, is at the top of the reading list in Russia. In fact, Orwell's work is the most read book in Russia this year, 2022, at least in digital format.
The novel "1984" was the most popular this year on the platform of the Russian online book seller "LitRes", in the fiction category, and the second most requested in any genre, the Tass agency reported.
The English writer's novel was published in 1949, not long after Europe won the victory against Nazism, but also when the Cold War was already "in force".
George Orwell pointed out how, when writing the novel, he used dictatorship Joseph Stalin as a model for the cult of personality, the "all-seeing eye", of that "big brother" whose strong-arm policy somehow forces frightened citizens to think that "war is peace and freedom is slavery".
One of the most striking remarks from Orwell's novel is this: "Ignorance is power."
And the party slogan in the book was: "He who controls the past controls the future: he who controls the present controls the past."
And while Orwell's novel should have served as a reminder to every new generation to be careful so that the picture painted in "1984" does not become our reality, perhaps today's moment is a kind of denial.
It is therefore very symbolic that at this very moment, at the end of the year in which Russia attacked Ukraine, which is why, led by Putin, "on the pillar of shame" in most countries of the planet, this book was the most attractive to Russians. Some connection can be seen between that leader, modeled on Stalin, and today's Russia under Putin. World media remind that Vladimir Putin completely neutralized any form of political opposition, especially critical opinion. They even claim that he somehow rehabilitated Stalin. Maybe that's why they "swallowed" the work of the English writer...
This is confirmed, for example by the Reuters agency, by the fact that the invasion of Ukraine, which began in February, also resulted in the adoption of new laws that punish the provision of any information about the war that differs from that expressed by Russian officials. Also, the word war for what is happening in Ukraine is not acceptable but "special military operation".
Moscow officials still maintain that Russia has nothing against Ukraine, that it has not attacked its neighbor, and that it has not occupied Ukrainian territories that have been annexed.
Last week, the Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin he was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for spreading "false information" about the military - and for publicly mentioning evidence presented by Western journalists in Russia about Russian atrocities near Kiev. Those allegations were rejected by local officials as false. Also, the Kremlin spokesman said last month that the Russians did not attack civilian targets, although they bombed Ukrainian power plants on several occasions, which left millions of people without electricity and heating in the middle of winter.
Some, quite wrongly, understood "1984" as a textbook to be learned. And so Orwell's world, unfortunately, became ours. The media under control, the "conducting" of social networks, the freedom of thought that has been replaced by the "freedom of speech" is something that is lived today.
However, the Russian translator of the last edition of "1984" sees not only the connections of this book with Russia, but also draws parallels with Orwell's novel elsewhere.
"Orwell could not even in his wildest nightmares have dreamed that the era of 'liberal totalitarianism' or 'totalitarian liberalism' would take over the West, and that people would be separated, isolated, behaving like a raging herd," she said this spring. Darja Celovalnikova.
In one of the parts of the book, Orwell describes the beginning of April 1984, and one evening at the cinema. On the program, of course, were all war films.
And one, a good one, was the one "with a ship full of refugees bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea":
"The audience was very amused by the footage of a huge fat man trying to swim away while being chased by a helicopter, first you see him rolling in the water like a porpoise, then through the helicopter's scope, and then he was full of holes, and the sea around him turned pink and he sank suddenly as if the water had entered those newly opened holes, and the audience laughed uproariously as he sank. Then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering above. There was a middle-aged woman, perhaps Jewish, sitting on the bow with a little boy of about three years old in her arms. The boy screamed in fear and hid his head between her breasts as if trying to dig his way into her, and the woman hugged and comforted him even though she herself was turning blue with fear, and all the time she covered him as much as she could, as if she would her hands to protect him from the bullets, then the helicopter dropped a 20 kilo bomb among them, a terrible flash and the boat was blown to pieces".
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