Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past. 

– George Orwell, 1984

While many respected authors have tried to untack the complete potential of the dystopian genre, it is often considered that George Orwell was one of the few who not only succeeded in that endeavour and set a new standard in the genre, but also significantly overjumped his own time. Although the genre has many fans, only a few pay attention to another dystopian masterpiece, unfolding not on the dusty pages of old folios, but in the field of modern reality. As the world is far from seeing an end to the aggressive and unjustified Russian war in Ukraine, the Russian government, and particularly its long-standing leader, Vladimir Putin, is constructing a new reality for its population. With shocking precision, following Orwell’s lines as directives, Putin is actively implementing already tested concepts and techniques in a modern tech-savvy digital environment to achieve those same goals. Many attempts were made to draw parallels between the Russian totalitarian model and Orwell’s world; however, this essay aims to summarize and outline the main connections that allow one to claim - Putin is a new author of today's 1984. While leaving room for much more exotic ways to achieve the goal (and actively utilizing them), the Russian state focuses on media distortion to control reality, historical manipulation to shape the past, and language engineering to narrow the thinking process as its main tools for producing an obedient mob. By carefully examining how these famous techniques are being implemented in the digital era, one can gain a better understanding of the insights of modern totalitarian states and, if desired, protect oneself from the unwelcome influences of those methods.

The degree of the government’s control over the life of a citizen

While examining Orwell’s work closely, it is possible to note that one of the main themes of the novel is the role of the state and authority in human life. Winston Smith, the protagonist of the novel, lives in a dystopian world that is completely controlled by a previously unseen political force called the Party. The authorities control every aspect of citizens' lives, from the coffee they can drink to their own thoughts. The author clearly demonstrates that, despite the wide abyss between ordinary people and the “secret mechanisms” of the political system, their lives are directly dependent on the Party’s innards in one way or another. The Party and its leader, Big Brother, are presented to the reader as invincible and unshakable pillars, so firmly entrenched at the helm that, with the help of many tools, including unlimited scientific capabilities, they have created the impression of eternal rule. Thus, any idea of revolution, uprising, or regime change seems not only ridiculous in the minds of citizens but also hopelessly futile even at the stage of contemplation due to the general mental and intellectual degradation caused by the authorities. However, the book itself mentions a time when the world was ruled by so-called “greedy capitalists” who, with their system, did not allow less wealthy citizens to live. Based on that, it is concludable that the Party, like any political force, emerged gradually, and it could’ve been prevented from achieving such an unshakeable grasp on society by more or less usual tools like the system of checks and balances or simply by careful and politically engaged citizens, that are present in any nation, regardless of the presence of the former. The following quote is a description of the most common class (Orwell states that it is approximately 85%) in Winston's world — the proletariat — which confirms the above thoughts:

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. (Orwell)

The gist of this quote is a surprisingly accurate reflection of contemporary society in the Russian state, which is what draws a direct connection between the imaginary world and the real state. In other words, the citizens of Russia were too preoccupied with their daily affairs and considered the politics of their own country to be too complicated, which is why, after some time, people whose regime is so similar to that of the Party came to power. Observations conclude that although many Russian citizens feel intense pride in their state, an absolute majority of them don’t wish to take any part in political processes, which logically results not just in the fear of changing a totalitarian regime, but in the lack of even thinking about any major shifts. For instance, a public opinion survey states that:

Just 30 percent [of young Russians] say they have voted in an election in the past two years, and even fewer say they have signed a petition (21%), filed a complaint (21%), participated in public hearings and committees (15%), or participated in a protest (2%). (Smeltz)

Surveyors then perfectly summarize the variety of received data by saying that, knowing no other leader but Putin, young Russians are simply on the kind of “diet of political indifference” that keeps the wheel spinning.

But what could have caused such “indifference”? Why, for instance, unlike many empires such as France, Britain, or Spain, has Russia not followed a transitional path from the maritime (or in this case, land-based) hegemony of past centuries to a democratic, or at least liberal and republican, model? Of course, the twenty years of Putin’s “hybrid democracy,” authoritarian and totalitarian rule, could not have passed without consequence, and it is indeed young Russians who may have been raised in an environment where they not only knew no more liberal state but also never witnessed another government except for Putin’s one. But what about older generations? Did Gorbachev’s famous perestroika and Khrushchev’s thaw achieve nothing? Did only seventy years of the Soviet era yield such fertile fruits? Yes. And not only. The point is that delving a bit deeper into the history of the two-headed empire reveals the absence of any form of governance, throughout Russia’s entire existence as a state concept, that involved even a hint of power divide. From the early Muscovite tsars in their wooden towers to the general secretaries and Putin’s very own “hybrid democracy,” Russians have never known a system of checks and balances, nor the codification of their freedoms and rights in anything resembling a constitution; power has always been centralized, often authoritarian, and totalitarian (Valentine). In other words, the way a Russian engages with politics lies in making peace and adapting to what is “handed down from above” rather than trying to establish a government that would serve the people. Moreover, this approach to politics was a blueprint for an average Russian for approximately the last eight centuries. Consequently, a unique political culture has formed, a “diet of political apathy,” which continues to shape the relationship between a central authority figure (the Tsar, gosudar) and the people to this day. Thus, Russian political apathy emerges both from a deep distrust of change and from the state’s deliberate efforts to suppress it, presenting alternatives pathetic—thus this passivity is not merely accidental but a deeply encoded cultural reflex, shaped over a millennium of patrimonial rule that equated political involvement with the danger of repression rather than participation.

 Returning to Putin and Orwell as to two authors of the dystopian genre, it’s not hard to draw a parallel—the artificial degradation orchestrated by the Party’s authority, its endless control focused, among other things, on ensuring that the proles are only concerned with the superficial consequences of Party policy, preventing them at all costs from thinking systematically, rationally, or organizing for protests and actions, resonates with the timbre of Russia’s historical political culture, in which citizens are conditioned to behave more as objects of a certain authority rather than active participants of that same politics. Thus, when citizen involvement in a country’s political processes is low, state bodies—and especially the figure who has concentrated that power—see it as an ideal opportunity to seize greater control, dismantling any systems of checks and balances, thriving in the chilling grip of widespread political apathy.

Additionally, Western societies and states tend to place institutions in a vital position in terms of power seizure prevention methods. This suggests that the possible observed drop in the quality or independence of institutions might be a sign of authoritarian shifts in politics. Although Russian democratic or even republican institutions never functioned properly due to skyrocketing levels of corruption, shadow economy, nepotism and patronage, a decline in their humble effectiveness provided even more space for Putin to consolidate the state from being controlled by many oligarchic players to being submitted solely to him. The literature review investigates this: 

Putin inherited imperfect institutions from the Yeltsin era. Russian institutions suffered from the typical weakness of the formal state in transition, as state capacity in regimes undergoing political transformation is generally lower than in established autocracies and consolidated democracies (Bäck and Hadenius 2008). Moreover, the formal state in Russia was also severely corroded by the omnipresent informality (Ledeneva 2013; Vasileva-Dienes 2019). 

(Klimovich)

These studies portray that both a degrading interest in the political life of a nation and a slow decline in any existing institutions could be credited as the main factors in the rise of a totalitarian state, as in Russia’s case. In this way, the novel anticipates the methods of nascent regimes, showing that inadequate political control begins with the systematic cultivation of public indifference.

Emotional and historical engineering

The novel also conveys some signs and formation processes of a totalitarian world that could be unmistakably identified in the policies of the Russian state. With each new chapter read, the reader becomes increasingly horrified by the complexity of the Party's autocratic mechanism and the sophistication and power of its tools. Members of the Outer Party, which includes the main character, are engaged in rewriting history in a manner convenient for the authorities, destroying facts and axioms, openly disseminating propaganda, and concealing the truth. Big Brother literally controls the country's past and future, thereby depriving its population of history, the roots from which people usually seek the path when they do not know how to act. The author neatly paints a rather vivid picture of these detailed mechanisms:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. (Orwell)

Following Orwell’s instructions precisely, the empowered Russian authorities successfully conduct those practices in their realm. Modern Russian school history textbooks are rewritten annually to align with the state’s official line, adding more and more events and people that never existed or the existence of which undermines the new, “right” reality, meticulously but unstoppably changing reality for Russia’s inhabitants. Almost following the work of Orwell as a handbook, Putin shapes a new historical reality in his realm -  a research article by Cambridge University Press proclaims: “I examine efforts to rewrite school history in Putin's Russia, efforts whose precedents in Russia can be traced back to the nineteenth century. “ (Kurbak). Many states and empires throughout history sought and actively exploited opportunities to “edit” history in their favour, to highlight their greatness and uniqueness as political entities; this trend is notably evident throughout history. However, the Russian Federation presents a particularly notable modern instance and surprising scale of alterations, as it has consistently twisted and directly denied significant chunks of real history throughout many centuries, especially in recent times. 

As discussed before, many political entities, especially empires, were famous for twisting and putting “accents” on particular pieces of historical periods to prove the needed political narrative. For instance, the British Empire notably aimed to promote colonized inhabitants as intellectually and spiritually unsophisticated pagans, who were in holy need of embracing Britain’s rule, technology and religion. Nevertheless, the age of empires is gone, and as the modern world aims to eliminate the consequences of those eras by advocating globalization, tolerance, liberalism and inclusion, Russia is still eager to employ many history-denying techniques nowadays. 

The most notorious case was expectedly the rapidly changing course of Russian policy towards its own history and of its neighbours after full-scale Russian invasion and undeclared war against Ukraine in 2022. Particularly, a month after the invasion began, Vladimir Medinsky (“ultra-conservative former culture minister and who is aide to Putin” according to The Guardian, who was also later leading the Russian delegation during the infamous negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul in 2025) announced the need to swiftly “revise” history and “mobilize” all assets in education (Kurbak). Openly (since there is no active political participation of Russians in politics), highly placed authorities thus characterized new alterations in national educational policies:

… we are living in a history textbook’ at the moment, and ‘if we keep living as before, without being mobilized and readjusted [to the new reality], we will soon realize that this is the last chapter of our history’ and ‘the language in which it will be written might not be Russian. (Kurbak)

Perhaps, the most striking manifestation of these policy reforms was the introduction of a new, explicitly propagandistic course in schools, tellingly titled “Conversations About Important Things.” The gist of the new curriculum lies in a specific set of questions asked to pupils, with “correct” answers attached to them, concerning Ukraine, invasion and other themes that are “vital” to the worldview of developing generations. Notably, studies report that 

Teachers were instructed to focus on heroic examples of self-sacrifice in honour of Motherland. The materials drawn for the lesson entitled ‘Heroes of our time’ included a fragment of a movie telling an imaginary story of Muhammad from Dagestan, who served for the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. (Kurbak)

While Winston Smith is hardly labouring to construct a new, controlled by the Party, imaginary reality through literally burning historic documents in a special compartment right on his workplace, passages from media, and meticulously inserting demanded narratives in informational flow, the Russian state is actively altering our reality by inserting absurdly unbacked statements in the minds of their youngest ones. The newly printed textbooks reproduce carefully constructed narratives that demonize Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, echoing propaganda long propagated through state television. The paper reports: 

It includes a chapter justifying the war in Ukraine and describing a military threat to Russia: ‘The establishment of military bases and training camps for the Ukrainian army by the USA and Great Britain encouraged the Ukrainian authorities … to prepare a violent takeover … According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, U.S. laboratories have been organised on the territory of Ukraine to develop biological weapons. Kyiv called for possessing a nuclear weapon … A young generation of Ukrainians is supposedly being educated on the basis of neo-Nazi ideas … .(qtd. in Kurbak)

Another point for reflection is the Two Minutes of Hate. This is a daily exercise during which Party members are required to watch a film depicting the enemies of the Party (in particular, Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and actively express their hatred for these Party foes for exactly two minutes. Big Brother utilizes Two Minutes of Hate as a means of effectively cultivating negative and aggressive emotions towards the enemies of the Party, so that in the future he can count on their influence on the consciousness of the population in matters of capturing these enemies, developing blind patriotism, and spreading the ideology of the Party. Additionally, by focusing the mob’s attention on external foes, Big Brother also ensures that it fosters and sustains blind unity within the system, causing its residents to overlook the real struggles, such as a lack of essentials and extremely low quality of life. Winston describes this phenomenon in a rather detailed manner:

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. (Orwell) 

Notably, this piece could not help but imply to the modern reader the infamous broadcasts of Russian propaganda. The Russian government has long controlled and used television to spread such content for hours, directing the flow of hatred toward specific groups of people. During such broadcasts, speakers increase the pace of their “sermons,” gesticulate actively, demonstrate increasingly sharp and aggressive emotions, and infect the viewer with this powerful energy of anger.  

Not only does the Russian totalitarian state echo that of Orwell’s, but it certainly facilitates and brings a propaganda theme on a whole other level of quality and scale. The peculiarity of the Russian national government-controlled TV to call for extreme emotions of hate towards domestic and foreign foes was noted as early as 2015, in the first years of its invasion of Ukraine in the East regions, signalling about awareness of the Russian authorities of the power of the following technique: “Russian state TV … employ[s] techniques of psychological conditioning designed to excite extreme emotions of aggression and hatred in the viewer” (BBC Monitoring, 2015). Since then, the aim was to produce these emotions regularly, targeting a wide audience across a gigantic land empire. This particular repetitiveness cultivated growing, malignant, artificially reinforced feelings, providing a fertile ground for aggression and domestic support of inhumane and unlawful governmental policies. Report by FIDH (international legal NGO), in collaboration with Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group and Center for Civil Liberties, highlights: 

Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine… [has been made] possible by years of intense and escalating propaganda of hate designed to justify and facilitate Russia’s territorial conquest of parts or all of Ukraine …virulent hate speech that denigrates and calls for violence against Ukrainians based on their belonging to the Ukrainian nation and political views, arguing that it amounts to the crime against humanity of persecution under Article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute. (International Federation for Human Rights)

In the world of Smith, Two Minutes of Hate are organized with a huge screen and a mob of Outer Party members sitting, glued to their places by hate towards Emmanuel Goldstein; in other words, the machine addresses an audience. However, the Russian state aimed to personalize this experience, using the traditional news format, by having actual human beings express those emotions and directly conveying data to the viewers, thus encouraging them to imitate such behaviour. Among many infamous specialists in propaganda, Vladimir Soloviev is perhaps the most spectacular individual in this realm. Following the teachings of Big Brother, Soloviev, among many methods, is actively manifesting the image of an external enemy (a widely agreed-upon feature of fascism) to unite and set minds for a proactive engagement against the “Rotten West”, to count on the unshattering allegiance of the mob when needed. For instance:

Vladimir Soloviev, a well-known host on Channel One, Russia’s main state television channel, publicly threatened both Armenia and Georgia… He said with regret that Russia should have fully occupied Georgia in 2008, as this would also have stopped Armenia from moving West. (Thomas de Waal)

Additionally, the total control over all of the activities of every citizen in any place in the state is another notorious feature of both realities. With the help of television screens, the party constantly monitors the activities of the population not only during long working shifts, but also on crowded urban streets, in public squares, at home, on walks, and even in overgrown forest suburbs. Every word, action, and even thought is tracked in real-time, recorded, controlled, and, if necessary, utilized for mental or physical support of censorship in conversations, writings and among the vast networks of brain neurons. Moreover, each citizen lives according to a constructed schedule that is set according to their type of activity, including morning exercises, labour, and leisure. It is rather easy to grasp that nowadays this function is performed by smartphones and computers, which can not only monitor us with cameras and microphones, but also track our movements, purchases, contacts, and other information that humanity has digitized. While being a handy toolkit for almost every inhabitant of the Earth, be that a child, a teenager, a student, a working white-collar adult or a middle-aged physical labourer, every could find something to one’s taste, simoulteneosly these technologies provide a dangerous opportunity for third parties, as corporations, particular groups or figures, and in this case – governments, to monitor and control movements, actions, and even thoughts, shared by users in a digital dimension in neverending stream of texts, videos, images, memes, posts, and even private calls. It’s ironic how a smartphone manufactured fully legally in South Korea (a properly functioning democracy with high scores in human rights index) could be exploited by the Russian state systems and special services to construct and sustain a regime, violate all fundamental human rights and freedoms, propagate absurd, hate- and rage-soaked propaganda, and shape an ideal totalitarian society. Truly, a miracle of a digitalized, “at least partially liberal”, and globalized international society. 

In 2025, the Russian government, in collaboration with a fully loyal Russian tech giant VK, released a new, “otechestvennyy” (domestic, native, originating in the land and the nation) super-application – “Max”. A Reuters report highlights a notable feature of Max that indicates direct governmental involvement in its development and deployment: its planned integration with state services. Quite often compared to China’s WeChat, this digital product represents another step in transforming Russia into a fully controlled, panoptical society. 

While digging inside the “eye of the Kremlin,” researchers and security specialists have expectedly spotted a toolkit for advanced surveillance, Forbes emphasizes:

The researcher, who completed the analysis with phone forensics tool Corellium [outlines]… “This app just gathers all the data and logs it. I don’t remember seeing that in any messenger app,” … “… It is insecure by design to serve its purpose: people surveillance. (Forbes)

There can be no privacy anymore for Russians, as its range is strikingly huge; the app provides a platform for users to send messages, talk to one another, share files, and transfer money across Russian banks. Notably, the Kremlin already announced that it plans a continuation of the functionality of Max, including the digitalization of some government services, “allowing” businesses and individuals to prove their identity to the authorities quickly and efficiently (The Atlantic). Thus, by merging personal and work communications with the financial sector — the two strongest and widest bloodlines of modern economies and societies in any country —the Russian state is looking to transform Max into a perfect tool for deep surveillance. Moreover, to dispel any doubts about its readiness to meddle in every aspect of a Russian citizen’s private life, the empire—leveraging its full ability to shape digital and business policies through “private” corporate entities—demands that Max be automatically pre-installed on all devices in Russia, starting from September 1, 2025. Consequently, combining obvious security lacks, a wide range of covered spheres and pre-installation on all digital tools, it’s possible to state that Russia has created, is creating and will advance in developing a sophisticated tool for truly full control of its society. 

Consequently, one could claim that Orwell’s intellectual child perfectly demonstrates the signs and formation of a totalitarian system, allowing us to compare Winston's country with modern Russia. Thus, precisely because of this similarity in the ways of promoting and utilizing rage and hate, constructing images of external and internal foes, shaping new versions of history to justify and popularize the state’s line, and exploiting up-to-date digital monitoring tools, the book remains relevant today as a great step-by-step guide for novice dictators, decades after its publication.

How does totalitarianism shape language?

Another striking feature that signals a totalitarian country's ongoing construction project is the role of Newspeak in Russia. The novel illustrates the undeniable influence of Newspeak throughout the story. According to the plot, a colleague of Winston shares that the 11th dictionary of Newspeak is being composed and actively promoted in social and intellectual circles. Newspeak is a new type of language, distorted by ideology and party-bureaucratic lexical phrases, in which words lose their original meaning and take on an opposite, often senseless essence, all difficult concepts are simplified, synonyms are abandoned, and making an official line of the Party ominously present in every phrase. Notably, Newspeak serves several purposes, with the main ones being: the destruction of abstract thinking by leaving only the means to express thoughts about the simplest physical actions and material objects, the fixation and multiplication of words modelled to express political and ethnic concepts and scientific terms used by representatives of a particular field. Besides, Newspeak maximally excludes any ambiguous interpretation of words, leaving only their physical meaning. The author explains the role of Newspeak as follows, through the already mentioned colleague of Winston, when he speaks to Winston:

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. (Orwell)

Unsurprisingly, with a process of cultivating a proper totalitarian regime in Russia, the efforts to change the way people exchange their thoughts, including politics, by the Russian government are aimed at introducing its own Newspeak. Right now, quite unnoticed by its own citizens, the Russian government is actively implementing a similar kind of Newspeak. Words that resembled and meant concepts that were inconvenient for the political and global position of the Russian Federation have been replaced. Terms that unnecessarily reminded people of the active war with Ukraine have been removed and replaced, simplified with more neutral ones that are not as powerful in meaning, that convey something less striking. Such a lexicon makes people perceive the situation significantly better on a psychological level, which is one of the factors contributing to the impossibility of changing the political regime and the continuation of disinterest in politics. In the Russian case, as for now, the Newspeak is aimed more at mediating the mental effects of the imperial war launched by Russia in its fogged citizens' minds. In other words, it bends reality and presents rather a variation of it, the variation where the Russians aren’t invading, but liberating, where their helicopters don’t crush due to the Ukrainian army’s strikes, but “harshly land”, where the explosion of a nearby steel factory isn’t a physical destruction of an enterprise that manufactures critical components of the Russian war machine with a goal of its elimination, but just “pops”. 

It is, of course, incomparably easier to process the “truth” when it is properly softened. Reading a state-approved news site on a perfectly legal Chinese smartphone while commuting to one’s Moscow office, the capital’s resident learns of soldiers who “fulfilled their duty during the special military operation.”, while Russians in provinces receive news of their relative, an occupier, who “sustained injuries incompatible with the continuation of life processes”, think about this far more calmly than if he had simply “died”. How mercifully lighter this sounds than the blunt, brutal reality of a full-scale war, the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Deep down, those who are clever enough know what those words and phrases mean, but the modified terminology anesthetizes the mind. And since the unvarnished truth is an unpleasant thing, a direct proof of the Russian imperial essence, the very word war must be forbidden, carefully removed from the public lexicon (Janda, L.A., Fidler, M., Cvrček, V).

Yet the Kremlin did not stop at that modest linguistic surgery. Having apparently skimmed Orwell for inspiration, it set out to adjust the entire vocabulary of public life. As various disinformation watchdogs report, words that once named atrocities now denote “incidents,” losses become “negative successes,” and censorship turns into “information security.” Every syllable is polished until it reflects only what the state wishes to see. Russia’s modern Newspeak no longer hides behind subtlety; it proudly stares the world in the face, calling manipulation a patriotic duty. One disinformation watchdog reports a couple of bright examples:

According to experts, Newspeak colors the language ideologically and justifies repressions and wars of conquest. Thanks to it, the annexation of Crimea is transformed into “reunification”, and the occupation of Ukrainian lands with a full-scale invasion into “liberation”. It also smooths out the negative and diminishes the scale of failures at the front. Explosions become "pops", helicopters and planes do not fall but "fall on their sides" and "make a hard landing", collisions of ships become "rapprochements". And finally, the escape of Russian troops from the Kharkiv region turns into an "organized transfer of the Izium-Balakliia group to the territory of DNR". (Disinfo Detector)

While witnessing the active transformation of the Russian language, shaped by the official Kremlin agenda and the requirement to eliminate any possibility of wrong thinking, it’s possible to state that both Orwell and Putin noticed the simplicity and yet horrifying effectiveness of simple language alterations. Thus, among many other notable traits of totalitarian realities, the modern Russian state and Orwell’s Ingsoc (official ideology that the Party practices) share the one of Newspeak. Consequently, proving that Russia is a totalitarian state, and actively shifting its and others' (who are somehow connected to it offline or online) reality through the main tool of modern communication – language. 

To conclude…

The novel is a forever-living classic among dystopian paperbacks. It does not feature a complicated plot or a diverse array of characters. Instead, it entices the reader to dive into a world of control, moral degradation, general decline, and totalitarian society. To experience firsthand what it is like to be Winston Smith in a time of technological advancement and complete loss of control over one's life. As implied above, the book was published in the midpoint of past century, long before the widespread incorporation of smartphones into our daily lives, the Internet, and the rise of modern dictatorships. The literature masterpiece is commonly considered to be George Orwell's fulfilled prediction about future information transmission technologies, but the more modern readers look at the world, the more they realize that this prediction has come true in other, even more frightening forms. World-famous and translated into a vast number of languages, the dystopian novel is as relevant now as ever because it raises critical political, moral, and social issues that, unfortunately, persist and intensify in the future.

While modern technologies were thought to bring a new era, the one with extraordinary freedom from governments and physical constraints, communication, they ironically found their way into reinforcing some authoritarian and totalitarian models by serving as a universal tool of oppression, control and restraint. The following could be observed in Russia, for instance, where the need to monitor and tame residents requires implementing some familiar methods from Orwell’s masterpiece, the ever-living classic guide to dystopian realities. With the realization by Western citizens that democracy and liberal order aren’t automatically caused by capitalism (Snyder), it obviously becomes a burden, a responsibility of ours to closely monitor our own authorities and, if needed, intervene in times when every one of us is on the path to becoming a Winston Smith in the relatively near future.