A man reads "1984" in Moscow.
Credit: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images
(Reuters) --
George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984", set in an imaginary future in which totalitarian rulers deprive their citizens of any ability to act to maintain support for senseless wars, tops the most popular e-book lists. sold in Russia.
The novel is the most popular fiction download of 2022 on Russian online bookstore platform LitRes, and the second most popular download in any category, the state news agency Tass reported on Tuesday.
The English author's novel was published in 1949, when Nazism had just been defeated and the Cold War in the West with his former ally Josef Stalin and the Soviet communist bloc he now led had just begun.
The book was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988.
Orwell said he had used Stalin's dictatorship as a model for the all-seeing Big Brother cult of personality, whose "thought police" force cowering citizens into "doublethink" into believing that "war is peace." , freedom is Slavery".
But some see contemporary echoes in the rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has eradicated political opposition and critical media from the public sphere in his two decades in power, as well as reforming Stalin's memory.
His invasion of Ukraine in February led to new laws making it a crime to publish any information about the war that conflicted with official statements.
The Kremlin shies away from the very word "war," referring instead to its "special military operation."
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The Moscow authorities continue to claim that Russia does not hold a grudge against Ukraine, that it did not attack its neighbor and that it is not occupying the Ukrainian territories that it has seized and annexed.
Last week, Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on charges of spreading "false information" about the military, for discussing evidence uncovered by Western journalists about Russian atrocities in Bucha, near Kyiv, which according to Russia had been invented.
And last month, the Kremlin spokesman said there had been no attacks on civilian targets, despite waves of shelling on Ukrainian power lines, which have left millions without heat or electricity in the dead of winter.
However, the Russian translator of a new edition of "1984" sees the parallels with Orwell's novel elsewhere.
"Orwell could not have dreamed in his worst nightmares that the era of 'liberal totalitarianism' or 'totalitarian liberalism' would come to the West, and that the people -- separate, rather isolated individuals -- would behave like an angry herd." Darya Tselovalnikova told AST editorial in May.
George OrwellLiterature
