The USSR in NYC

The Soviet Union invented a new language that Orwell might have called New Speak. Soviet political leaders spoke to one another using Marxist phraseology, and spoke to the Russian public in a glowing torrent of propaganda. Eventually, the emptiness of Russia’s official discourse collapsed on itself. Everyone knew that the Pravda, the Moscow newspaper named for the Russian word for “truth” meant just the opposite. People preferred to seek out literature smuggled in from the West, printed illegally at home, or gleaned from jammed foreign radio signals.

At some point, the discrepancy between Russian reality and Russian words became unsustainable. Soviet propaganda was also directed outward, to its allies as well as its enemies. A USSR New York exhibition pamphlet, printed in 1959, illustrates the eerie quality of the Soviet effort to convince Americans that the Soviet Union was outperforming the American one and would soon surpass it. While admitting that Russia had not yet built a Communist society—which would presumably make any comparison with flawed capitalist states absurd—the pamphlet reminds readers that the country was the first socialist state in the world, and had overcome a long legacy of economic and cultural backwardness to become the world’s second largest industrial power.

Moreover, Russia had used socialist planning principles to increase gross industrial output by “36 times since 1913.” Its scientists had engineers had already made important contributions to diverse fields, including agriculture, optical instrumentation, engineering industries, nuclear medicine, the biological sciences, and machinery. The pamphlet also emphasized Soviet successes in the production of iron, steel, chemicals, and various forms of energy. And, if one cared to listen to friendly Russian exhibition staff members, they would tell Americans about Soviet advances in electronics, semi-conductors, radio and television applications, and infrared instruments.

Best of all, the pamphlet graciously reminded Americans that the Soviet Union, and not the United States, had launch the first “artificial satellite” into space, Sputnik, a milestone in the long history of human accomplishment.

The Soviet Union as a Product of Science Fiction

My generation grew up on George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. Looking back, high schools across the country must have been concerned that American children needed these books to be properly inoculated against Communism. Don’t get me wrong: both books are excellent depictions of the very real dangers of totalitarianism. In the case of 1984, this wasn’t really science fiction: the Soviet Union was already spying on its citizens, squashing dissidents, redefining words to mean the opposite of what they had originally meant, systemically deceiving citizens through propaganda, and making every effort to engineer human beings to be more amenable to control from above.

Animal Farm wasn’t far off either. The Soviet Union had created a brand new caste of bureaucrats, replacing a traditional aristocratic and bourgeois hierarchy with one that consisted of party functionaries. But before there was Orwell’s 1984 there was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s book, We. We is a science fiction story about a future that doesn’t look all that different from the one Orwell described in 1984. There’s one state, one state newspaper. `In We, citizens are told that individualism is a purely destructive force. For this reason, people don’t have names, only combinations of letters and numbers, like R-13 for example. People are told that “everything is for the good.” They should trust in the state and the existing order of things. Nothing should be challenged.

In Zamyatin’s dystopia, citizens are told that the past is primitive. Rationalism reigns supreme. The state and its people celebrate what they call mathematical-philosophical reasoning, and mathematical equations dominate the text. The people are also told that love is primitive and that they should therefore participate in a system of love-making as a form of lottery. As your turn comes up, you receive a coupon from the government that allows you to select a lover. The next time you receive a coupon, you may select a second woman, and so on. In this world, the government has eliminated most forms of irrationality and emotion. People behave as they should.

Zamyatin’s We was written at an interesting moment in Soviet history. It represented an incredibly rich stage of Soviet cultural and literary experimentation. The novel is forward thinking in terms of both its futuristic content and its innovative style. However, We was produced at a moment when Stalin was tightening his grip on political power and would shortly eliminate most forms of cultural independence. The most interesting thing about We—which isn’t the most lively narrative—is that it reminds readers that the Soviet Union it implicates seemed like a product of science fiction even at its birth. Nothing like it had ever been created previously.

For the first time, the state was actively promoting the idea that it could overcome conflict, produce prosperity, unleash human creativity, enhance culture, and in general overcome some basic human flaws, including jealousy, thievery, disunity, disorder, and irrationality. In We, even the bible is an historical artifact, a product of an unenlightened age. But the moral of We, and indeed the whole of Soviet history, is that Original Sin does in fact exist and cannot be overcome, even if we wanted it to be.