One thousand years after the revolution that brought the One State into being world-wide, each person is assigned only a number, which operates as that person’s name. Widely seen as a direct criticism of the Soviet socialist utopia, Zamyatin also intended to indict all governments who act to preserve stability at the cost of human freedom, in any form, and he reportedly based his One State society on a visit to England. However, We spawned some of the most famous dystopian future fiction writing in English, including George Orwell’s 1984, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. We was the first novel banned by the Soviets’ censorship bureau consequently, it was not published in Russia until 1988.

in 1924, this novel is considered the originator of the dystopian future fiction genre. Zamyatin died in relative obscurity in Paris in 1937, five years after the publication of Brave New World, and twelve years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, two derivative works which would cement Zamyatin’s place as one of the most influential authors of all time.We, by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin, is a science-fiction novel set in a dystopian future totalitarian society. His petition for an exit visa to Stalin was granted (some say miraculously), though he never achieved the fame or genius outside Russia he had known within it. As a result, he was blacklisted entirely, and hence, to remain a writer, Zamyatin was forced to leave Russia. Forced to look elsewhere for an audience, Zamyatin smuggled his work out of Russia and published it in the West. The parallels between his fictional One State and the emerging totalitarianism of the Communist Party were unmistakable, and We was the first work to be banned by the Soviet censorship board. This ended with his attempted publication in 1921 of his masterpiece, We, a novel about a futuristic police state that controlled not only every action of its citizens, but every thought and emotion as well.

As an early Bolshevik, Zamyatin enjoyed-at least initially-enough credibility after the October Revolution to continue to write philosophy and even political satire, becoming one of the first Soviet dissidents. Born in Russia in 1884, Yevgeny Zamyatin was one of those courageous and idealistic Communists who was willing to suffer for speaking out against the abuses of both the oppressive Tsarist monarchy and the quickly corrupted Soviet Union which supplanted it.