Big brother is watching you. Nowadays, it’s non-fiction
November 20, 2021
1984 by George Orwell is a great novel. For those who want to understand the psychology of people living in a totalitarian/authoritarian/dictatorial (necessary to emphasize) state, and which motives determine their behavior, this book is a must-read.
When I read it in early 1984, it seemed to me an exaggerated image of what was happening around us. Brezhnev had already passed away after 18 years in power, and Gorbachev had not yet arrived. The country was headed by Yuri Andropov, the former head of the secret police, the KGB. This organization in the Soviet Union was personified for many as Big Brother.
If I invited a foreign student home, with whom we were sharing a desk in the classroom, a day later one of my parents was summoned to the First Department (as the KGB office was called in Soviet organizations) and warned about the inadmissibility of such a step on my part. As soon as I told a joke loudly in a student café, ridiculing Soviet reality, the next day the head of the Communist organization whispered to me that I was discrediting the image of a Soviet student. And as a punishment, I was deprived of the bonus to the scholarship that I received for good marks.
Yuri Andropov died in February 1984, being replaced by Konstantin Chernenko, who held the chair of the country’s leader for 13 months, more than half of which he actually spent in a hospital bed. In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the head of the Soviet Union. On the one hand, the contrast between the young and vigorous Gorbachev and the decrepit old men from the Brezhnev team gave rise to optimism and hopes for change. On the other hand, these changes still had to wait and their direction was not obvious. The slogan of economic speed-up (uskorenie) rested on the omnipotence of the command system, in which the CEO of the company had to coordinate any action with the branch ministry. And the ministry, in turn, had to settle all the details with the State Planning Committee, the State Committee for Supply, the State Committee for Prices, and the State Committee for Labor. The inefficiency of this structure was obvious, but the sacred structure created by Stalin could not be touched.