[jhbadger]

I think a better way of phrasing this would be "While Wells, Huxley and Orwell invented totalitarian worlds, the Soviet writer was living in one." Of course Western society had flaws, and that was part of the point of Wells, Huxley, and Orwell writing their dystopias, but Zamyatin was living in the sort of society British authors could only imagine in their dystopias.

[cambalache]

But that is a very simple-minded take. You just have to read "Down and out in Paris and London" to notice people suffered and suffer a lot in the "perfect" western world, so Orwell didnt have to "imagine" material to describe a dystopia, London, Paris or Moscow would have worked just the same, although for different reasons. Sometimes a soviet writer had a way better life than a worker in the west. Zamyatin was part of the soviet intelligentsia, and wrote "We" as a 36 year old writer in 1920 when the USSR was barely 3 years old. And yes he did it against what he perceived was an alarmingly increase in the totalitarianism of the new regime, but it is not like he had passed 10 years in the Gulag by then.

People in the west dont know how to calibrate the experience of people in other societies, for the man in the street what really sucked was the economy, not the totalitarianism, because an argument for the same lack of control of ACTUAL political and economical power can be made for the citizens in western countries.

By the way, Zamyatin also wrote "Islanders" where he satirized, and criticized all the hypocrisy, frivolities and arrogance of the English middle classes which he apparently detested, but you rarely see that work lionized in The Guardian or here, I wonder why.

[versale]

The USSR didn’t exist in 1920: the civil war was ongoing (until 1922).

[jojobas]

In the West people suffered from their peers' indifference, in Stalin's USSR they suffered because it was the plan.

I wouldn't like to starve to death, but if I had to choose, I'd rather risk hunger from unemployment in 1930s England than dig the Belomor Canal in 1930s Russia.

[mieses]

While Zamyatin satirized both sides, you seem to be quite certain of your ideology when you say that it's all about the economy and not totalitarianism. I guess you've never met high-ranking members of communist regimes who emigrated for ideological reasons, leaving behind relatively comfortable lives to start from scratch in the west. I'm sure you would twist their experience into a greed thing.