In this town, a four-hour drive from Moscow, a giant banner glorifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine covers the entire wall of an old cinema. With pi

'Russia now is like 1984': Inside a Russian dystopian library

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2024-06-06 05:30:06

In this town, a four-hour drive from Moscow, a giant banner glorifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine covers the entire wall of an old cinema. With pictures of soldiers and a slogan:

I’m standing outside it. There’s a poster here, too. Not of a Russian soldier, but a British novelist. George Orwell’s face stares down at passers-by.

There are multiple copies of Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; the story in which Big Brother is always watching and the state has established near-total control over body and mind.

“The situation now in Russia is similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four,” librarian Alexandra Karaseva tells me. “Total control by the government, the state and the security structures.”

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party manipulates people’s perception of reality, so that citizens of Oceania believe that "war is peace" and "ignorance is strength".

Russia today has a similar feel about it. From morning until night, the state media here claims that Russia’s war in Ukraine is not an invasion, but a defensive operation; that Russian soldiers are not occupiers, but liberators; that the West is waging war on Russia, when, in reality, it was the Kremlin that ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.