Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is a novel that offers a utopian society built purely on mathematical precision and statistical logic. While many contend it was an inspiration to Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, one would be hard pressed to argue Zamyatin was not similarly inspired by Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. One would be hard pressed to argue it was not simply because the rational-based utopia presented here is nearly identical to Swift’s portrayal of the Houyhnhnms and their ration-based society. Zamyatin is similar to Swift in that each writes a story that is purported to be an improvement over the conventional societies in which they lived. However, neither author suggests that their “utopia” is a possibility in reality because the systematic ration-based societies they portray do not gel with human nature. Zamyatin saw the potential for abuse in the Bolshevik revolution and the socialist-communist organization of society. As the author says with We: “This is where we are going. Stop while there is still time. Throughout the poetry and the mockery, there is great warmth—for Russia, for man—and profound grief over the particularly intense ordeals they were to suffer in our century of terror, so uncannily foreseen in the novel. [Zamyatin] seems to be saying to all the dogmatists, all who attempt to force life into a rigid mold: You will not, you cannot prevail. Many will not be destroyed” (Zamyatin xv).
The author was in favor of the Bolshevik revolution, but he also understood that it contained the seeds of totalitarian oppression which would come to dominate Russian existence for more than a half century after its success. Zamyatin once said that those who preach an absolute ideal are already dead. He believed humanity was kept alive only by the heretics, like Christ, Copernicus and the Russian equivalent, Tolstoy. Many argue that We is science fiction, but it is not. It is social sati...