The hero of the Russian writer Andrei Platonov's story "The Trash Wind" exclaims: "Beautiful 19th century, you're wrong!” The story is about the Nazi regime in Germany, which seemed to have emerged shortly before, but in fact it is more about the Soviet totalitarian regime. The 19th century was a time of unbridled dreams of socialists like Fourier, Owen, then Marx came along with more pragmatic dreams. They saw the future as beautiful, bright, very attractive.
In fact, the beginning of the 20th century disproved all these beautiful dreams and in fact saw the realization of Utopia very repulsive. Socialists who came to power in several European countries showed themselves as destroyers of morality not only in Soviet Russia but also in Hungary and Bavaria, where local socialists began repressions against the propertied classes.
Looting and shootings accompanied the attempt to establish the same regime in Finland. In the last 3 countries listed above, the supporters of traditional values managed to fight back and suppress communist plots. But the psyche of many social groups and even entire nations was traumatised. The result was a reaction: the representatives of extreme right-wing movements and parties who came to power unleashed terror against the left. Within one decade, almost the whole of Europe had become a sanctuary of ultra-right and ultra-left regimes. And in literature, dystopian alternatives took the place of the utopians' beautifully soulful dreams.
One of the first was a novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a Russian writer who had had the experience of living under the Communists. In1920 he wrote the novel We. The meaning of the title is that We, that is, the collective, the community was opposed to the individual and turned into an instrument of suppression of the individual. Soon followed other books of a similar nature, the most famous of which are Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and George Orwell's "1984".
Both books show a totalitarian society formed in the West, that is, under capitalism. Although, of course, the novel 1984 shows a kinship with the Soviet regime, which through violence and propaganda achieved the formation of the so-called new man. The closest resemblance to the regime depicted by Orwell was the Soviet regime. This is not accidental.
The writer was a socialist, participated in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the socialists. There he had the opportunity to familiarise himself with the methods of imposing the Soviet order. It was after participating in this war that Orwell moved away from socialism and realised that the future, where the Soviets beckon mankind, is hell, not paradise, about which the communist propaganda is constantly crackling. It goes without saying that in the countries that became the prototypes of totalitarian empires, pessimism about the future was not welcomed.
Only a happy future could await the inhabitants of such countries. And it was to be enjoyed by the nearest generations, especially the so-called science fiction insisted on it. The main task of this literature was to show the future non-alternative communist were present in the novels of Soviet writers. The heroes of such works were people possessed of only good feelings, they had practically no negative qualities. Therefore, these novels, which were quite a lot of editions, were actually very boring to read, and as soon as translations of American and English writers appeared, which were more realistic, readers pounced on them and there were queues in libraries. In the 60s the glamorous fiction of writers like Nemtsov and Efremov went bankrupt, but it was still being published for a long time. No one was interested in it any more, and the reader's imagination was captured by dystopia. These dystopias became more and more, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union it became the main genre of literature.
In fact, the first collision of people with cruel reality was shown in the story about Paradise Lost, when the devil slipped Eve an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. According to the ancient Arabs, it grew at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates near the city of Qurna. Despite the fact that many millennia have passed there, it is still in the same place. According to the legend, it used to dry up from time to time, but when they started to take care of it: either to water it or to spread the earth, new shoots sprouted again. When I visited the place in the nineties, the tree was standing dry. Mankind has learned a lot over the long centuries of its history and will not allow the tree of paradise to wither forever. So let us wait for the crown of the spreading tree at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates to turn green again.
This article is republished here to mark the memory of Sergey Plekhanov, a columnist with Observer and author A Reformer on the Throne, who passed away in Salalah last week
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
