"1984"

George Orwell's great book came out 60 years ago

In the Soviet Union, Orwellian dystopia was equated with subversive literature, "defaming the Soviet state and social system." And it is no coincidence: Oceania, in which the action takes place, and its leader - Big Brother - were as if written off from the USSR and Joseph Stalin (the novel was released in 1949). However, not only. From Nazi Germany, from Maoist (and in some ways even today - p. 27) China, from today's North Korea - too. The desire of the ruling party of Oceania to “deprive sexual intercourse of pleasure”, so that subjects would consider “sexual intercourse” exclusively as a “small nasty procedure like an enema”, is a feature of all totalitarian regimes brought to absurd hyperbole, claiming absolute control not only over the head and wallet, but also behind the bed, that is, behind the purely private life of subjects. Even love, sex had to be subordinated to the party in order to obtain a “new breed of people”: “all marriages between members of the party were approved by a special committee,” Orwell describes the life of Oceania.

The poverty produced by the planned economy under the care of the Ministry of Plenty, and the quality of the ration product for the common people, were also recognizably Soviet. The current young reader, who has never seen either the “gin” of the Kaluga spill, or the “Prima” cigarettes of the Pogar factory, can no longer explain what recognition effect the completely realistic passage produced: “He pulled out a cigarette from a crumpled pack with the inscription “Victory Cigarettes”, distractedly holding it vertically, as a result, all the tobacco from the cigarette spilled onto the floor.

The strength of the book was not only in the recognizable Soviet everyday life, but in the precisely grasped typological features of power, which turns a person into a “cog” - a creature practically devoid of reason and even meaningful speech, replaced by “newspeak”, on which only “rechekryak” slogans are possible. The bulk of the inhabitants of the new earthly paradise has been reduced to the bestial state of "proles" - disenfranchised hard workers who make up the lower rung of the social hierarchy. The party, of course, claimed to have "freed the proles from their chains. But at the same time, in accordance with the principle of doublethink, the party taught that the proles were by nature inferior beings... Hard physical labor, caring for the house and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, cinema, football, beer and, most importantly, gambling - that's all that fits in their horizons. The politics of the proles should not be included, "they need only primitive patriotism - to appeal to him when it comes to lengthening the working day or reducing rations."

Bunting is hopeless. The protagonist of the book, Winston Smith, commits the gravest crime: he allows himself to doubt that a country where every step is controlled by the thought police, where black is called white, and for any offense, especially for a "thought crime", a person ends up in the torture chambers of the Ministry of Love, the country , where history is constantly being rewritten, and hatred for a mythical external enemy (Orwell’s fictional Eurasia and Ostasia, but the eye of a modern reader involuntarily recognizes in them Ukraine, England, Georgia, and above all, the United States) is constantly heated - that such a country is a model of universal happiness. Moreover, Smith loves and is loved, and this is one of the most serious offenses in Oceania. But the competent authorities are on the alert, as in the Stalinist and then less bloodthirsty Brezhnev USSR, they beat the crap out of Smith, and he is again filled with love for Big Brother.

In the USSR, despite all the persecution, the novel was wildly popular, making up a significant part of the "samizdat" (see Book - sentence ), slowly but surely undermining the Soviet totalitarian colossus. "1984" remained banned even after the announcement of the "glasnost" policy (see Love Big Brother ). And only when the authorities realized the need for a complete "perestroika" - in 1988, it was finally published. Then almost no attention was paid to him, the country lived with the hope that this whole Orwellian nightmare was over and would never happen again. In vain. Orwell's novel is becoming more and more relevant in Russia every year. And although historians continue to argue that the past is repeated only in the form of a farce, the victims of this farce are not at all easier.