/ world today news/ The opinions expressed in this material do not necessarily coincide with the positions of Pogled Info. They are entirely the product of American author John Rowden.
Officially banned in the Soviet Union until 1988 — distributed only as samizdat at the risk of long prison sentences until the era of glasnost and perestroika — George Orwell’s 1984 topped fiction download lists in mid-December in the Russian Federation. TASS, Russia’s state-run news agency, reported on December 13 that Orwell’s dystopia topped the overall 2022 fiction e-book sales on the LitRes platform, a Russian online audio and e-book seller, and was the second most popular download in every category.
Western media reports, where rumors circulate every week that up to half of the Russian population opposes the continuation of the war in Ukraine, give the impression that the current bestseller of “1984” in Russia is due to widespread public dissatisfaction with the regime of Putin and the growing belief that he really does look like Oceania from “1984”
However, this conclusion may turn out to be wrong, or at least premature. Pointing to the still strong support that Putin has at home and the apparent willingness of the Russian population to endure the hardships of a long war, it can be noted that TASS had no qualms about reporting on the bestseller of 1984. Nor do LitRes and other online book sellers hesitate to sell the book.
Also worth noting is the fact that all Russian editions of “1984” for sale are edited and typed by authors officially approved by the Ministry of Culture.
It is worth noting that the timing of the sales spike of “1984” from mid-2022 coincided with the publication of a new edition of “1984”, in which the translator Darya Tselovalnikova omits any mention of parallels between Oceania and Russia, and more soon argued that today’s “liberal totalitarianism in the West” largely conforms to Orwell’s nightmarish vision.
According to Tselovalnikova, not Russia, but rather the corrupt, “liberal so-called democracies of the West are truly totalitarian in 2022 – that is, dominated by demagogues and vulgar populists who manipulate their demonstrations against Russia for their own criminal geopolitical purposes.
“Orwell could not have dreamed in his worst nightmares that the age of ‘liberal totalitarianism’ or ‘totalitarian liberalism’ would dawn on the West and that people – separate, rather isolated individuals – would behave like an enraged herd.”
Remember, this particular edition of “1984” is being sold on LitRes — and it was aggressively promoted by the Russian media. In a statement last May, Maria Zakharova, the foreign ministry’s top spokeswoman, laid out the Kremlin’s line on Tselovalnikova’s 1984 slant: “For many years we thought Orwell was describing totalitarianism,” she said.
“This post-Gorbachev era of self-loathing and gullible acceptance of the West’s denigration of the USSR was a rehash of Western propaganda. Such a view of ‘1984’ “is one of the global fakes,” she noted.
“Orwell wrote about the end of liberalism. He wrote how liberalism will lead humanity to a dead end.
Ignoring the obvious fact that most of the satirical references in 1984 refer to events and personalities (including Stalin as Big Brother) in the 1940s USSR, Zakharova concludes that Orwell “was not writing about the Soviet Union, but for the society in which he lived.”
Zakharova’s line since 1984 is supported by a set of reliable mouthpieces approved by the Ministry of Culture.
“Russia’s actions in Ukraine are essentially anti-war,” said Dmitry Kiselyov, the aforementioned Kremlin TV host.
Sergei Lavrov, the head of the foreign ministry, has repeatedly denied that Russia has “invaded” Ukraine, touting the official line that Ukraine is a “brother” that should be returned to the “Russian world” – a euphemism favored by Vladimir Putin for rationalization and protecting the Kremlin’s dominance over its sphere of influence and expansionist campaigns.
Certainly, both explanations for the popularity of “1984” contain truth. Growing political dissent and disenchantment with the current regime of Vladimir Putin, with readers seeing parallels between the oppressive government described in the novel and the current political climate in Russia, no doubt partly fueled the boom in sales. Yet it seems undeniable that the novel was co-opted by the government as part of a propaganda effort, using the book to attack the West and portray Russia as a victim, thereby justifying the regime’s actions and control of the media.
A third possible explanation, which I find the most plausible (and perhaps the most depressing), also deserves attention: Did Vladimir Putin and the Russian establishment figure that a form of literary glasnost was perfectly permissible—because it was completely harmless? The hypothesis cannot be easily dismissed: once “dangerous” books during the Soviet era, such as “1984”, are now available from the official state bookseller, promoted by the Ministry of Culture, reissued in new editions by leading state publishers such as AST Publishing in Moscow, and taught in Russian universities because – unlike the case during the Soviet era – they clearly no longer pose a threat to the “totalitarian” regime, “liberal” or illiberal.
This view is eloquently expressed by Orwell’s Russian-language biographer, Masha Karp, a dissident émigré living in London and author of the forthcoming George Orwell and Russia (Bloomsbury), scheduled for publication in mid-2023.
In one passage in his book, Karp takes a line from The Prevention of Literature (1946)—Orwell’s most famous defense of freedom of thought and expression—and gives it new emphasis. Orwell wrote in the essay:
“The organized lie practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary device of the same nature as military deception. It is something inseparable from totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces were ceased to be necessary.”
The “key words” that apply to Russia in 2023, Karp argued, “have ceased to be necessary.” Karp notes that “concentration camps” and “secret police forces,” albeit in a rather different (and more insidious, less visible) form, are still with us.
“What has really ceased to be necessary is the censorship of books.” Noting that the circulations of most “dangerous books” tend to be small (less than 5,000 copies), she nevertheless emphasizes her main point:
“You cannot imagine what wonderful books have been published in Russia in the last 20 years! Only now, with this war, they don’t publish on the cover the names of the authors who left the country in protest against it, but before February 24th, everything… was published… [Кремъл] realized that books aren’t so dangerous after all.”
I believe Karp would also admit that our first two explanations for the 1984 bestseller contained partial truths. She estimates that 20 percent of the Russian population – numbering about thirty million citizens – quietly opposes Putin in varying degrees of opposition and would like to see Russia “more Westernized” in various ways. (This does not equate to supporting Western positions and/or involvement in the war in Ukraine, she notes, for which there is still far less—and little public and vocal—support.)
She also estimates that at least 30 percent of Russians are staunch Putin supporters, consisting of “fascists, racists and empire-worshippers.” She concludes: “Half the population can be turned this way and that, depending on the media – whether it is state-controlled or free.”
The battle for Orwell’s ghost has been going on in Russia for several years, Karp notes.
“Orwell’s name is something of a shorthand both among Russians who oppose the Putin regime in general and the war in Ukraine in particular…”
However, as evidenced by the sales figures of “1984” for a whole decade, interest in Orwell grew. As early as 2015, various Russian sources—including the Russian Book Club, the Russian Book Union, the Russian Publishers Association, and online bookstores such as ozon.ru and labyrinth.ru—reported that sales of 1984 were on the rise.
For example, in a Christmas report in 2015 (December 23), RBC announced that translations of “1984” had sold a total of 85,000 copies, making Orwell’s novel “one of the ten best-selling books”. (1984 wasn’t the only grim futuristic script on Russia’s 2015 slate: it was joined by “2035,” a post-apocalyptic dystopia from Dmitry Glukhovsky set in the ruins of Moscow and — as in Orwell’s Runway One — after a nuclear apocalypse.)
Given that “1984’s” rise to bestseller status in 2015 occurred as a result of the invasion (an expression of the American author, not necessarily overlapping with the opinion of Pogled Info) in Crimea and the 2014 “annexation” – shades of Moscow’s land annexation of four more Ukrainian provinces in 2022 – I consider it likely that the same combination of factors will account for the 2015 sales spike as in 2022 – 23 years old
The difference between then and now is twofold: first, news of Orwellian fashion in Russia was limited to the Russian media in 2015 and remained largely unreported in the West. Second, in 2022, 1984 climbed to #1 in Russia instead of just breaking into the top ten. (Even before the bestseller edition, translated by Darya Tselovalnikova and aggressively promoted by the Ministry of Culture in 2022, 1984 was well promoted by Russian publishers. One source reports that the 2021 circulation numbered 482,600 copies—i.e. . even before the 2022 sales surge amid the Ukrainian war.)
“1984” was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988, almost four decades after it was first published in the West. Even after it was finally published, it was available only to a small number of Soviet Communist Party ideologues among the nomenclature of the Ministry of Culture, and was not read or discussed even in Party circles.
The novel has a long history of banning and censorship in the Soviet Union, whose official dissolution on Russian Christmas 32 years ago – December 25, 1991 – was widely celebrated in a spirit of naïve triumphalism as the birth of the “new world order”. ” and “the end of history” throughout the West.
No prominent Sovietologist in the West imagined at the time that a little-known functionary in the Communist Party—an obscure KGB lieutenant colonel—would rise by the end of the decade to become a Russian strongman second only to Stalin in strength and endurance (two decades years, and counting).
Or as Masha Karp writes in George Orwell and Russia:
“In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale criminal war in Europe and used nuclear blackmail to prevent anyone from intervening. A new era has begun [на международна нестабилност] and we still don’t know how it will end. However, one thing is clear – these catastrophic developments have unfortunately been made possible by a stubborn refusal (in Orwell’s words) “to see the Russian regime as it really is”. (opinion of the author Masha Karp and the American author who quoted her, not Pogled Info)
Karp added in a private message: “The West simply does not care about the ongoing ‘Orwellian’ events in Russia over the past two decades, such as the countless attacks on freedom of speech and human rights violations.” It was this indifference that gave Putin a sense of impunity.
Translation: SM
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