Historically, fictional literature has been used to reflect on the life of the time in which it is written. Authors, thrown by the system and displeased by developments, take what they know and use it to make a statement. Over the course of history, authors have jabbed huge incidents such as the French Revolution in Charles Dickins’ A Tale of Two Cities, missionary invasion and Chinese poverty in Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, and Chinese Communism in Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao. On the topic of the Russian Revolution, Russian Communism, and the plight of the country’s people, however, many volumes of fictional literature have been written. Examples of these tomes are Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. The ideas within these works of fiction tie in with ideas found in historical literature such as Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Richard Pipes’ Communism: A History, and lastly Ronald Grigor Suny’s The Structure of Soviet History. With the use of class readings and outside readings of fictional utopian literature, a succinct image of both the facets of perfect Communism and the failings of Communism may be developed.

In the order of publication, the first utopian literature to be written was by the Russian author Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin. Born in Lebedian, Russia in 1884, Zamyatin was the son of a priest and a musician. Under czarism, he joined the Bolshevik Party and was arrested for his revolutionary activities. Even though he was exiled, he lived illegally in St Petersburg and studied to become a naval architect. After a series of lectures at the Polytechnic Institute, he was once again arrested but was quickly granted amnesty and was sent to England to aid in the construction of icebreakers. On the eve of the Russian Revolution, he returned to Russia. Although in favour with the Party for a long time following his return to Russia, he began to grow weary of the Party’s repression of freedoms and the harshness of the new regime. Quickly the tables turned and Zamyatin found all of his large body of work, which included stories, plays, essays, and many Soviet newspaper articles, banned. After writing a letter to Josef Stalin, Zamyatin was able to go into exile with his wife and died in poverty in Paris in 1937. It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev’s reign that his pieces such as We were once again published.

The original utopian piece, We, takes place in the far-future world of OneState. The narrator is D-503, a mathematician in charge of the architecture and engineering for OneState’s space ship the INTEGRAL. The people of OneState intend to use the INTEGRAL to take their way of life to other societies; this way of life is one dominated by mathematics and the near-worship of their overlord, the Benefactor. D503, completely comfortable in the literal bubble of OneState, has his meaning of existence challenged by a radical woman, I-330.

Over a short amount of time, I-330 pulls D-503 into the outside world and begins his mental degradation. He begins to challenge the ideas of the society in which he lives and loses touch with his closest friends. His entire way of life begins to change to something that resembles what a free man’s life would be. He enjoys sexual encounters with I-330, is attracted to old things (something that should never be loved by people of OneState) lying around the house to which he goes with I-330, and starts to miss his scheduled times with his former lover O-90. O picks up on this and decides to follow D-503, but in her own way, by conceiving a child. With the help of I-330, O moves to the outside with the savages where she will be safe from the arms of OneState.

By the end, D-503 has gone full circle. In the beginning, he was the perfect drone of OneState, and then he rebelled against their ideas. But after he participates in an attempted coup by the savages and I-330, all of the people involved are taken in for reconditioning. I-330 is tortured whilst the others are forced to have the “Great Operation,” an operation that effectively removes all traces of the soul, which was something that D-503 had gained over the course of the book. Therefore, like in all of the Utopian literature featured, the people of the system were not able to escape and overcome it but were rather crushed by the head.

Chronologically, the next book was Aldous Leonard Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley was born to a well-to-do English family in 1894. When he was fourteen, his mother died, and soon after he suffered an ailment that led to complete blindness for a year and a half. Eventually he regained his sight enough to attend college at Balliol College, Oxford where he earned his Bachelor’s in English. Because of his eye troubles, Huxley was unable to peruse either a career as a scientist or be a soldier at the front in World War I. Because of this, he turned to writing. Although he started with poetry and the editing of articles, he moved on to books that were mostly satirical in regards to the day’s current events. It was during this time that he first attacked Marx’s The Communist Manifesto in his essay collection Do What You Will.

In 1932, Huxley wrote his novel Brave New World, which ended up turning over H.G. Wells’ standing optimism regarding the advancement of science. It was a response to his fears regarding the mass changes of his time and was eagerly picked up by people across the world, especially in England and the United States. Soon after writing Brave New World, Huxley moved to the United States and turned away from pure fictional writing and began to write screenplays. Close to the end of his life, he wrote Brave New World Revisited, which took into account the developments in nuclear sciences. He also wrote two new books regarding drug use and had started more, but after his house was destroyed in a fire, he stopped writing. Huxley died in 1963 in Los Angeles, California. Brave New World is a slightly different variation of the over-all theme of Communism, but somehow it has the exact same feeling as We. Inexplicably, Huxley had no prior knowledge of We when he was writing Brave New World. This novel, set far in the future, features a society dependent on new technology and the drug soma; this society, unlike the picture of perfect Communism, is one broken down into harsh classes. These classes, however, are so ingrained in the culture that no one wishes to be in a different class. Children are not born but rather created in factories and then educated and raised by the government. This government is headed by a group of World Controllers and the focus is on the section of the world run by Mustapha Mond.

Over the course of the book, Bernard Marx, an Alpha psychologist, falls in love with Lenina Crowne, a Beta nurse at one of the human hatching facilities.

Although Bernard is named after the famous author of The Communist Manifesto fame, he is very insecure regarding his place in society and has difficulty fitting in. Lenina herself is relatively unorthodox in the world, which pulls the two of them together. Both venture into the savage world where they find what life used to be like much like We’s D-503. They bring back the ideas of the old world in the form of one of these savage beings and his mother who used to live in the World State. Unlike in We, people are fascinated and amused by this savage being, John. John, however, cannot take the pressure of World State and it eventually beats him like the characters in the other utopian literatures were beaten, only he ends up killing himself rather than being re-educated by the new governing system.

The last books in order of publishing are Animal Farm and 1984, both written by the British author George Orwell. Orwell, born as Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903, was Eton-educated and began writing for college newspapers during his time in England. When in England, he began to develop his distaste for the English class systems. His hate towards the class system was solidified after he failed to win a scholarship to university and was forced to return to India, where he served in the Indian Imperial Police. However, he also began to dislike the imperial rule of India, and in 1927, he resigned. From this experience, he was able to write a collection of essays on the topic of the behaviours of colonial officers that he called Shooting an Elephant. Following his resignation, he moved to Europe where he was a beggar working low-paid jobs. He continued to write and used his experiences floating around as help in his writing. In 1933, he finally adopted his pseudonym, George Orwell.

A few years later, Orwell had adopted decidedly socialist views and moved to Spain with his wife. There he fought with the Marxist Party militia and ended up being shot through the throat. In the end, the Stalinists on his side began to hunt down and imprison Anarchists; his friends were thrown into jail, but Orwell managed to escape with his wife. This experience made him very anti-Communism whilst making him a fervent supporter of the English Socialist party. It was during the Second World War that Orwell wrote his novel Animal Farm, a thinly veiled stab at Stalin’s Russia. Right before his death of tuberculosis in 1950, his book 1984, which showed the horrors of a world without free speech and full of corruption of the truth. Animal Farm, the most literal of any of the pieces of literature used in this essay, is based completely on the dictatorship of Josef Stalin. Mr Jones, the owner of Manor Farm, abuses the animals and doesn’t give them as much to eat as he receives himself. One night, Old Major, a prize-winning pig on the farm who is based on Vladimir Lenin, tells the other animals that he had a dream about a time where the farm would be completely run by the animals themselves with no human to force his power upon them. Unfortunately, he dies before his idea is able to take shape. In step Snowball and Napoleon, or Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin, a pig and boar who lay out the ideas of Animalism. Eventually, the animals manage to run the humans off of the farm and rename the farm “Animal Farm.” Although ridiculed by the people around them, they start out with a very pleasant life and work very cooperatively. As the years go on, however, Napoleon begins to take complete control, running off Snowball with his guard dogs; eventually, all pigs and dogs are given more than any other animals and yet they do no work for the good of the farm itself. By the end of the novel, the pigs have become exactly like the humans who preceded them, walking on their hind legs and drinking liquor, much like the Stalinist dictatorship became like a harsher version of tsarist Russia.

Lastly, 1984 was written. Unlike the other books, this one did not take place in a far away time; for many of the people reading it, 1984 was in their lifetimes. The book centres about Winston Smith, a lower member of the Party in the nation of Oceania. Wherever he goes, he is watched by the omnipresent Big Brother, head of the entire Party in Oceania. Everyone’s thoughts are controlled by images and commands given by the Party, even going so far as to accuse people of “thoughtcrime,” and Winston’s job is in the department that assures that anything that time has proven false is changed. Although he has his doubts about the governance system, he keeps them to himself to protect himself. He hides from the telescreen, keeping a diary of seemingly unconnected thoughts that he insists in his mind is written to a member of the Inner Party by the name of O’Brian. Although he starts by hating a certain woman, in the end they become lovers. Julia is as rebellious as he could ever hope to be (though she rebels for completely different reasons than Winston), however she hides herself well, volunteering for Party organisations and working at many pro-Party events. They continue their secret love affair by venturing into the prole district of Oceania, making love and talking in a store run by Mr Charrington, a man who is seemingly an old prole, or non-Party member. After a meeting with O’Brian that offers to give Winston and Julia access to a book written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the main enemy of the party. They read it together in Charrington’s store until the government’s troops come in; Charrington and O’Brian, both members of the Thought Police, had betrayed Julia and Winston. Both are taken to the not-so-aptly-named Ministry of Love where both are tortured for months until their spirits are broken. By the end of the novel, Winston and Julia have both been completely reeducated by the government and find that they no longer hold any affection for each other. Both had betrayed the other. Much like in We, the novel ends with Winston confessing his love for Big Brother and the government in general.

The publishing of all of these books stemmed from many things, but one thing that most likely affected all of them was the publishing of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Marx was born in Trier, Germany in 1818 to a relatively well-to-do family. He attended university at both Bonn University and Berlin University where he studied law. It was at Berlin University that he was introduced to the ideas of Hegel, who believed that things could not exist without their opposites and therefore unity could only come about by equalising all opposites.

After his father’s death in 1838, Marx decided to begin his career as a university lecturer. He completed his doctorate at the University of Jena but could not find a position, so he turned to journalism where he found his articles were not published because of his extremely radical political views. In light of this, Marx moved to liberal Cologne, where a group known as the Cologne Circle was so pleased by his viewpoints that they named him the editor of their newspaper, The Rhenish Gazette. It was in Cologne that Marx met Moses Hess and began to attend Socialist party meetings.

Heavily influenced by the ideas of Socialism, Marx published a few highly controversial news articles and had to end up fleeing to France in fear of being arrested. He continued to write controversial articles and books and soon after became friends with Fredrick Engels, a man who had written on the oppression of English workers. As they had different strong points, the two men decided to work together to get their point to a larger audience. After trips to England and settlement in Belgium, Marx wrote the lead pamphlet of the Communist party known as The Communist Manifesto, which was based on a writing of Engels called Principles of Communism. It was published in 1848 and soon after, the Belgian government expelled Marx from the country. Only a year later, Marx’s excitement about the possibility of a world revolution began to fade. He was expelled from Germany and France before finding safety in London, where he lived in poverty with his wife and their children.

By 1852, Marx was writing articles for international newspapers, mostly American newspapers. With the income from this and an inheritance from his wife’s family, he was able to move into nicer quarters with his family. Unfortunately, his luck changed and both he and his wife became very ill; his wife was left deaf. He fell into debt once more but was pulled out by a wealthy German socialist, who offered him a job in Germany that Marx refused. Despite the refusal, the man continued to send Marx money until his death in 1864.

In 1867, Marx published Das Kapital, which was an analysis of Communism and his belief that capitalism was doomed to kill itself in time. He began work on a second volume of the work along with his daughter Eleanor, but the work was slow, especially after his daughter left to peruse a career in Brighton. By 1881, both Marx and his wife Jenny were sick, and on 14 March 1883, Marx died.

Within The Communist Manifesto, Marx describes the goals of Communism and the theories of the movement. The main idea of Communism, of course, is that of class struggles and the exploitation that these struggles cause. The classes that Marx speaks of are caused by the means of production in a society; the heads of industry dominate above all others and make the lower classes their theoretical slaves. According to Marx, however, eventually the means of production and their relationships with society will diverge and a revolution will be caused by the lower classes, creating a new class that will become the new ruling class.

In detail, the modern society of Marx’s time was dominated by the class conflict between two sects: the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or wage-labourers. As time passes, however, the productivity of the inherently unstable capitalism will begin to fail. When this failure occurs, the proletariat will rise up and revolt against the bourgeoisie and take all private property, thus leading to a classless social order in which all things are co-owned by every person. As this is the main idea of Communism, the public owning of everything, the Communist party intends to support any revolution that leads to the extermination of capitalism and the institution of a Communism form of government. After this revolution, the Communists intend to take control of the new proletarian government and stay in position there as the new society is laid out, and then finally step down when they are no longer needed. Of course, this kind of idea leads to some dissent: why would the Communists want to take over the government and remove all private property? Wouldn’t this remove the right of the people to earn things for their hard work? No, Marx remarks, because by removing private property and making it public, the Communists remove a huge block in society’s path. Up until this point, the capitalists have been using private property as a way to exploit the proletariat; whilst they enjoy the best of everything, most of society doesn’t have anything, but they continue to dupe the common man into thinking that he can be like them. In response to even more dissent from the public, Marx continues. Many believe that if the system of work-and-prize is deleted, no one will work because there is no reason to work. Marx battles this by saying that capitalist society would have killed itself long before, as the people who actually receive anything in a capitalist society are the people who don’t work. Others claim that because of the disappearance of classes, culture will also disappear. Although Marx disputed this, time would prove this true in the Russian soviets. When the topic of the abolition of family arises, Marx replies that it should be abolished because families are only about capital in modern times, and because of this the family exploits the children for capital gain. On the same vein, people complain that Communism doesn’t allow for nationality, something that Marx explains by saying that members of the proletariat do not have countries, for they all have the same woes.

After addressing these things, Marx continues with how the Revolution will take place: seizing of the government, redistribution of public lands, institution of new taxes and abolishment of inheritance, confiscation of the land of anti-Communists, state centralisation of all previously government-held industries and transportation, a combination of all aspects of society, and the establishment of free education. Once these steps have been taken, society will begin to lose its previous character and become more homogenous. After this discussion, Marx moves on to discussing and refuting all other types of Socialist and Communist literature and concludes with a discussion of Communists in contact with other revolutionary parties and the infamous line “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”

In light of this, the typical movement is from the ideology to the first place that Communism was employed. Following the bloody Russian Revolution of 1917, a government headed by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin was instituted in Russia. From the beginning, the Bolsheviks were not concerned with matters of economy, but rather focused singularly on the translation of Marxism from paper to reality. Borrowing ideas from Germany and Marx, Lenin demanded the state control of banks, which led to great unrest amongst the Russians and did not help the situation of the impending civil war versus the new government and the Provisional one that it expelled.

With complete control of the government, Lenin was able to impose complete Communism on the Russians through the system of war communism in which all private property was taken forcefully. This, although sticking with the Marxist doctrine of abolishment of private property, did nothing to stabilise the economy. Fearful for the outcome of his country, Lenin allowed for some capitalism in the New Economic Plan, which he put into effect in the early 1920’s. Unfortunately, Lenin’s ideas for a fresh Russia were never seen to their end, as Lenin grew increasingly ill. His followers were not so sure about his ideas for Russia, and once he was out of the picture following his death in 1922, the ideas of Leninism began to become muddled and by the time Stalin ascended to power, the entire outlook of Russian Communism had changed. Instead of being like the perfect world that Marx imagined, life was becoming exactly like life on the farm in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Although Lenin left a few names in his final testament, Josef Stalin was the one who took the reins of the Russian government. Contrary to the belief of both Marxism, which called for the merging of all aspects of industry and agriculture, and Leninism, which used the New Economic Policy, Stalin created his own ideology that called for a programme of forced industrialisation. As presented in 1984, Stalin instituted what he called his “Five-Year Plan.” This plan took all industry under the power of the Russian government and extracted funds from the peasantry to assure that the plan was finished when Stalin wished it to be finished.

In accordance with the plan, all people were rushed to collective farms and their own land collectivised. If people refused, they were sent to hard labour camps in Siberia; although Stalin liked to pretend that this was done by the peasants themselves, in reality, it wasn’t. This was just one of many lies that Stalin told the world in his attempt to spread the untruth that Russian socialism was working perfectly. There was strict food rationing and Stalin-created catastrophes designed to pull the Russian people together under the Communist regime.

Stifled by his own paranoia, Stalin ordered the deaths and disappearances of many people within his government. As predicted by anti-Communists in Marx’s time, culture began to die out because all intellectuals were barred by censorship. Not only did culture disappear, but also the ethics and morals of Russians themselves began to suffer. In another deviation from Marxist doctrine, Stalin began a huge campaign of Russian nationalism, something which ended up making the Russian people identify the Communist government as the majority part of their picture of Russia; in fact, most Russians even in the current day cannot think back to the time of Stalin without feeling some nostalgia.

Thankfully, Stalin died in 1953 and a period of de-Stalinisation occurred across Russia. The country rid itself of the image of Stalin (although many still consider his image holy, as was apparent in Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb) and quickly returned to the worship of Vladimir Lenin under Nikita Khrushchev. The institution of Communism had proven to be a failure in the actual human world, where human nature prevails in all circumstances and cannot be eradicated by some operation like is shown in Zamyatin’s We. According to Pipes, countries that live under Communist rule all experience the same things: a sharp decline in living standards, the loss of their people’s freedoms and rights, and the emergence of a leader who consolidates all of the power and assumes all of the rights of the people whose rights he has stolen. In short, Richard Pipes managed to say it best in his conclusion of his work Communism: A History: “Needless to say, such an outcome is the very antithesis of the Marxist vision, which saw Communism as driven by impersonal economic forces and leading to boundless freedom for all.” (Pipes, 144)

All of the literature employs at one time or another ideas from the others and each manage to exemplify the failings of Communism as presented by Pipes. Orwell especially tied in his work in with Zamyatin’s, having read the latter’s work before beginning his. They all have endings typical of each other in which it is determined that no one can win against the system once it is set up, for the system controls everything, even people’s thoughts. Although they are so alike, there are still ones that are the epitome of whatever category they can be lumped in. Whilst it is apparent that a book such as Animal Farm is a response to Stalinism and Brave New World is a reaction to the insane industrialisation of the time in which it was written, the other two are perhaps different.

By the use of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night, which, although is fiction, was based on real-life post-Communist Russia, it seems that of all of the books, the closest to what actual Russian Communism was is George Orwell’s 1984. The disappearances of people, the changing of history to fit in with what the administration wanted, the poverty of lower class members, and many other horrible things are found in both pieces of literature.

On the other hand, with the ideas behind Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, it seems as though Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is the closest literature to the ideas of pure Communism. There are absolutely no parties and the Benefactor is elected unanimously. Everyone has the same amount of everything and all live the same way. There is no private property even down to people not “owning” other people like people “own” children or lovers. Everything is equal, which is what Marx intended in his utopian world.

In conclusion, although Marx meant well with his doctrines on Communism, they really cannot exist in the real world. The authors of the novels used in this essay have shown that even if the world devises ways to rid itself of reactionaries, there are always those fragments of human nature that remain and will be hard, if not impossible, to break. Communist systems have been attempted by the governments of Russia, China, and even a couple of South East Asian countries, but none of them have worked out to the idea that Marx had for Communist countries. Whether they failed because of sour dictators or eventually had to give in to some methods of capitalism, the fact is still that Communism cannot work in our world of human nature; even our literature admits to that fact.

Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1998. Liukkonen, Petri Aldous Huxley. 2002. Kuusankosken Kaupunginkirjasto. 30 May 2004. Liukkonen, Petri George Orwell. 2002. Kuusankosken Kaupunginkirjasto. 30 May 2004. Liukkonen, Petri Yevgeny Zamyatin. 2002. Kuusankosken Kaupunginkirjasto. 30 May 2004. Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1988. Orwell, George. 1984. New York, Signet Classic, 1950. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York, Signet Classic, 1996. Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla. The Time: Night. New York. Pantheon Books. 1994. Pipes, Richard. Communism: A History. New York, Modern Library, 2003. Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents. New York, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2003. Unknown. Karl Marx. 26 May 2004. Spartacus Educational. 31 May 2004. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. New York, Penguin Books, 1993.