The book We was written by Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1921 in early Soviet Russia. Zamyatin became a Bolshevik in the early 1900’s, working with the Bolsheviks throughout the years leading up to the October Revolution and being exiled multiple times by the Russian government. Zamyatin was an Old Bolshevik and he truly believed that Russian society had to change, so he supported the October Revolution and was present in St. Petersburg when it took place. However, in the years following the October Revolution, the Communist Party began to become more oppressive, primarily regarding censorship. Zamyatin was an author, he’d been writing consistently for about ten years by 1921, and he became very critical of the Soviet Party as they became more oppressive and began to censor more works.

We was written during the post-Revolution period of increasing censorship and it was a blatant criticism of the society that the Soviet Party was looking to create. In We, Zamyatin creates a dystopian society to represent how far from the original revolutionary ideals the Soviet Party has gone. The society that he creates is ruled by a government called the “One State”, a government that micromanages the lives of every citizen. Zamyatin writes We in a way that makes the reader think that the Soviet Party will eventually make Russia like One State and attempt to control everything that they do. He uses language in the book that is very similar to the propaganda used by the Soviet Party during that time period and he uses analogies that the reader would easily associate with the Soviet Party.

Zamyatin was a very brave individual. We was censored by the Soviet government before he could publish it in Russia, but he made sure that the manuscript made the journey to America where it was published in 1924. Eventually, his open criticisms of the Soviet Party would get him exiled from Russia, but before that time he did everything that he could to protest the absolutism that Russia was headed towards.