We, the most original of the anti-utopias, describes a walled-in total-control One State of rationality which stringently excludes the human factor. The central character, D-503, the inventor of the Integral, discovers some atavistic tendencies in himself, wavers towards rebellious elements, but finally undergoes the operation for removal of his fantasy centre, and watches unmoved as his rebel mistress is vaporised. However it is not certain that the wider revolution does not finally succeed in overthrowing the state and transporting humanity rather than sterility to the stars via D-503’s Integral.

    Berneri drew an optimistic conclusion from the book, in that it shows the weakness of totalitarianism, for ‘A thousand years of propaganda have not succeeded in transforming men into perfect machines; an operation on their brain is necessary to carry this out.’ (Berneri 1950: 316) Colin Ward and George Woodcock, among others, have commented on the debts of Huxley and Orwell to Zamyatin, probably considerable in the case of Orwell. P.R. in 1977 described We as ‘a scathing futuristic satire on the emerging Bolshevik state’; but Zamyatin was imprisoned by the Tsarists before he was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, and the satire has a wider application (a similar mistake has often been made in respect of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). Woodcock summed Zamyatin’s masterpiece up as ‘the first novel of literary importance to present a relatively complete vision of the negative results of the realization of Utopia.’ (Woodcock 1966: 170).