1984 in 2026: Deliberately Misreading Orwell, in Russia and America

In Putin’s Russia, though, Smith is now presented to children as a dangerous radical, not to be emulated. This contrasts to the last time Russian appreciation of 1984 appeared in Western headlines when, following the outbreak of Putin’s war against Ukraine, it was reported that Orwell’s masterpiece had become the bestselling e-book in Russia for 2022. The next year, it also achieved the distinction of becoming the most-stolen text from Russia’s leading bookstore chain; yet more proof, from a Kremlin perspective, that only criminal no-goodniks ever read the thing. Reading Between the Lines Once banned in Soviet-era Russia due to its ‘subversive’ depiction of Stalinist-inspired tyranny, 1984 was officially legalized in 1988 as part of liberalizing glasnost measures, although it had already been circulating in illegal samizdat form for decades by this point. As Winston Smith reads forbidden literature in the novel, and Soviet dissidents were likewise by definition also reading forbidden literature when perusing their underground samizdat copies, they saw in the character an admirable mirror of themselves, drawing courage from his fictional example. Following the recent, post-Ukraine upsurge in popularity for 1984, Western media sources largely interpreted the phenomenon as a recapitulation of the above sentiments, a hopeful sign Russia was full of unannounced anti-war rebels who saw a bit of themselves in Winston’s struggle with totalitarianism. In 2024, Britain’s BBC dispatched a correspondent to visit an obscure institution called The George Orwell Library in the equally obscure town of Ivanovo, outside Moscow. A small building with a large billboard of Orwell looking down at visitors from its frontage, the Library contained a selection of dystopian sci-fi novels of the broad 1984 model, like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, about future government censors who burn all books. The Library also carried non-fiction about topics like Stalin’s purges, the mass murders of the Russian Revolution, and failed post-Soviet attempts to transform Russia into a fully-fledged democracy. Founded by a local businessman, Dmitry Silin, who was later forced to flee the country after painting “No to the war!” on walls, and handing out free copies of Orwell’s text to passers-by, the BBC’s implication was that such bravery was likely to be contagious amongst the wider citizenry, with officials forcing the place out of its current premises and into much smaller offices instead. Yet, rather than state persecution, it seems more likely the Library suffered merely from state indifference: the chief librarian, Alexandra Karaseva, admitted her library had “few visitors.” Rather than banning books, as Stalin once did, Putin and his own commissars often prefer simply to ignore them, which in a way is much more devastating. Those courageous Soviet-era souls who once passed one another dog-eared photocopies of Orwell’s text down dark back alleyways to avoid the attentions of the KGB sincerely believed in the power of literature to change the world. The more skeptical President Putin, for his own part, appears to have noticed that, despite Doctor Strangelove and On the Beach, nuclear weapons still exist, and, regardless of The Camp of the Saints and Submission, uncontrolled mass immigration into Europe continues unabated. You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Coverage Western coverage which sees in 1984’s present popularity a harbinger of potential mass public uprising against Putin and his war may be just another form of outsider Wrongthink. Although 1984 is no longer banned, the editions on open sale are all officially approved by Putin’s Ministry of Culture. As such, the versions of Orwell’s text that are now proving such domestic bestsellers are couched, via introductions and notes, within a strict Kremlin-approved interpretative framework designed, like the syllabus of Siberian schools, to cause readers to understand the book in a certain specific manner. Rather than being a condemnation of the totalitarian excesses of Josef Stalin (and thus by extension of Stalin’s enthusiastic admirer Vladimir Putin), the Ministry-approved editions push the line that, in fact, Orwell was condemning the excesses of the liberal West, which was not truly terribly liberal at all, but a dictatorship in disguise. To a certain limited extent this may be somewhat true. During WWII, Orwell endured an unhappy spell working for the BBC, where he was forced into self-censoring his own radio news stories prior to transmission, which is very much like the job Winston Smith endures, clipping regime-embarrassing items out from newspapers before consigning them forever into the ‘Memory-Hole’. Yet current Russian editions of 1984 go much further than making this legitimate point, implausibly implying Orwell somehow managed to predict the contemporary post-Cold War world of what the book’s new editors call “liberal totalitarianism,” or extreme wokeness. Bizarre and self-evidently untrue Western media and political lies that trans-women are women, or that diversity is our strength, are indeed rather Orwellian in their own way. However, so is the blatantly untrue notion that Orwell himself, who wrote his book in 1948 and died two years later, could possibly ever have foreseen them. Of course, many Russian readers will not fall for the above lies, it being pretty obvious most Putinista apparatchiks are hardly literary experts themselves; Putin’s foreign media spokeswoman Maria Zakharova infamously once referred to the book as “1982” in a press conference. Nonetheless, the co-option of 1984 as a piece of pro-totalitarian propaganda, not anti-totalitarian propaganda, does represent a certain form of genius. The novel now stands presented as an early precursor of a new Russian sci-fi genre called ‘liberpunk,’ or ‘liberal cyber-punk,’ in which the West is depicted as a hyper-liberal hellhole ruled over by an intolerant rainbow dictatorship of gay Cultural Marxists, blue-haired hyper-feminists, BLM radicals and suchlike; an alternative means of consuming such material might simply be to subscribe to the New York Times. Capitalist Swine Yet Russia is not the only place where Orwell’s texts are being inverted in a laughably obvious fashion for dubious political means right now. Later this year, a new American CGI movie version of Animal Farm is being released in which the oppressed animals rise up not against Marxist pigs, but against evil capitalist billionaire human overlords instead, Marxism being thought quite fashionable these days amongst Hollywood types, even though they themselves do tend to be very rich. According to early preview-screening reviews from last year, the animation, directed by actor Andy Serkis, isn’t very good, filling the run-time with childish jokes about animals breaking wind and people falling over a lot. More fundamentally, the main enemies of the piece are not the Stalinist pigs, but the humans, who work for banks, and try to buy the animals off with “magic paper,” also known as “money.” One billionaire character drives a Tesla truck-type vehicle, and seems to represent a gender-swapped Elon Musk, who is evidently today’s extremist neo-Stalin to the average left-wing 2020s Hollywood scriptwriter: they don’t seem to realize Stalin aimed to suppress free speech, not facilitate it, unlike Elon with his remodeled Twitter/X. Once again, Winston Smith would only be a hero to persons of this topsy-turvy moral mindset because of his diligent office-hours censorship efforts upon behalf of Big Brother, not his attempted later rebellion against him. The movie even now has a happy ending in which, capitalism being successfully overthrown, the liberated Trotskyite livestock plan to create a “brighter future” for all. So did Pol Pot, once. As Variety warned its readers, “Woe to the student who tries watching this ‘toon instead of doing the reading.” The producers say they simply want to update Orwell’s classic text to “make it relevant to a broad-based, values-centric, family-friendly audience”, but that sounds like pure Leftist Newspeak in and of itself. Putin’s propagandists don’t need to doctor Orwell to make the West look bad anymore at all, then; today, the West is quite capable of doing the very same thing independently.