S03 E42: We: The One State, Glass Walls, and the Elimination of the Soul

Before Nineteen Eighty-Four, before Brave New World, there was We: the grandfather of dystopian fiction, written in 1920s Soviet Russia and immediately banned.

In this episode, we explore Zamyatin’s novel of the One State, where citizens are numbers, buildings are made of glass, and the only privacy is during scheduled sex. The protagonist, D-503, writes in praise of the system until he develops that most dangerous condition: a soul.

Zamyatin was a Bolshevik who became disillusioned. He saw where the logic of total planning and total transparency would lead. Not to utopia but to the elimination of everything that makes life human.

He wrote it as a warning. It reads as prophecy.

Source: “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924)