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Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1920)  ,
The Dragon and Other Stories (1966)
A reviewer in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review in 1976 described Zamyatin as ‘one of the most important political satirists in modern times. One
of the last thinking writers of any talent that Russia has produced.’
We, the most original of the anti-utopias, describes a walled-in total-control One State of rationality which stringently excludes the human factor.
The central character, D-503, the inventor of the Integral, discovers some atavistic tendencies in himself, wavers towards rebellious elements, but finally
undergoes the operation for removal of his fantasy centre, and watches unmoved as his rebel mistress is vaporised. However it is not certain that the wider
revolution does not finally succeed in overthrowing the state and transporting humanity rather than sterility to the stars via D-503’s Integral.
Berneri drew an optimistic conclusion from the book, in that it shows the weakness of totalitarianism, for ‘A thousand years of propaganda have not
succeeded in transforming men into perfect machines; an operation on their brain is necessary to carry this out.’ (Berneri 1950: 316) Colin Ward and
George Woodcock, among others, commented on the debts of Huxley and Orwell to Zamyatin, probably considerable in the case of Orwell. P.R.
in 1977 described We as ‘a scathing futuristic satire on the emerging Bolshevik state’; but Zamyatin was imprisoned by the Tsarists before he was
imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, and the satire has a wider application (a similar mistake has often been made in respect of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four).
Woodcock summed up Zamyatin’s masterpiece as ‘the first novel of literary importance to present a relatively complete vision of the negative results
of the realization of Utopia.’ (Woodcock 1966: 170). It won the
Libertarian Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1994.
Zamyatin's 1966 collection was
reviewed in Black Flag in 1975, and the review was reprinted in
the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review in 1977. R.P. described
these stories as "bitter jabs in the face of authority, orthodoxy and
tradition". Of these stories, however, only one - 'A Story about the
Most Important Thing' (1927) is regarded as SF.
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