Six years ago, George Orwell’s 1984 rose to the top of the U.S. bestseller lists as a result of comparisons between Big Brother and Donald Trump. This winter, the book was again at the top of the bestseller list—but this time in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. An official bulletin on December 13 by TASS, Russia’s state news agency, announced that 1984 had led the 2022 e-book sales totals in fiction on LitRes, the state online bookseller, and was the second-most popular download in any category. Within hours, this curious piece of news was being reported throughout the West.
Critics have not been slow to point out the numerous resemblances between Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and Putin’s puppet propagandists. In Great Britain, the Independent declared in December that it was hardly surprising that Orwell’s vision “about citizens living under an oppressive regime that is continuously engaged in senseless war has become the most-read book in Russia.” A columnist for MailOnline, the website of Britain’s Daily Mail, claimed that Orwell’s novel—published in 1949 when the cult of Joseph Stalin was at its height in the Communist world—“was based on Stalin’s Russia,” and that the “comparisons…drawn with Putin” are inevitable, because both tyrannical regimes are “Orwellian.” Both Stalin’s regime and Putin’s could serve as a gloss on a famous sentence from the novel: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” State-controlled broadcasters in Russia brazenly continue to insist that Russia did not attack Ukraine and does not occupy any Ukrainian territory (translation: this Ukrainian territory is not technically “occupied” by Russia because it has been annexed).
The story of 1984’s surge in popularity in Russia—TASS announced that sales of the book had soared 45 percent since the invasion of Ukraine in late February 2021—was even bigger news in continental Europe. “Orwell’s Novel about Repression Bestseller in Russia,” ran a headline in Portugal’s Financial News. “The story of absurd wars and totalitarian governments is all the rage in Moscow,” announced Turin’s La Stampa on December 18. Meanwhile, in Ouest-France, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the Francophone world, Carole Grimaux, a professor of geopolitics at the University of Montpelier III and the founder of the Center for Russian and Eastern Europe Research, noted that “the book resonates with the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin…. [I]t is a work that brings Russians back to the Soviet past, because of similarities between the fiction they read and the reality they live.” Russian readers’ current encounters with1984 represent “a return to their past to understand their present and their future.”
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Fortune.com drew attention to the similarities between 1984’s Newspeak and the euphemisms the Putin regime had foisted on Russian journalists, who were forbidden to describe the Russian military’s activities in Ukraine as a “war” or “invasion.” They were instead to call it a “special military operation.” A jailed Russian dissident, writing from his Moscow jail cell for the Calgary Herald, told Canadian readers that the Kremlin’s “relentless pro-regime and pro-war messaging” resembled 1984’s Two Minute Hates, except that “in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, televised hate goes on for hours.” The dissident political prisoner noted that Putin’s propaganda also includes the rewriting of history, with the USSR cast in a self-glorifying New Year’s Eve state broadcast as “a noble and benevolent state—the ‘Empire of Good,’” which was “destroyed by a mischievous scheme” of “domestic traitors” in league with Ronald Reagan.
Noticieras Financieras, the online Latin American news service, reminded readers in December of Orwell’s status in Stalin’s Russia, where he was banned and “listed as one of the writers most critical of the Soviet totalitarian system.” Commemorating the seventy-third anniversary of Orwell’s death on January 21, Noticieras Financieras added that the “imaginary future” projected by Orwell “in which totalitarian governments monitor their inhabitants and manipulate information” was “still relevant today”—especially in Russia.
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