‘Russia now is like 1984’: Inside a Russian dystopian library

Inside, the tiny library offers a selection of books on dystopian worlds and the dangers of totalitarianism.

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 till 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.

“I’ve met people who are hooked on TV and believe that Russia isn’t at war with Ukraine, and that the West was always out to destroy Russia,” Alexandra says.

“That’s like Nineteen Eighty-Four. But it’s also like Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. In that story the hero’s wife is surrounded by walls that are essentially TV screens, talking heads telling her what to do and how to interpret the world.”