Mick Hartley

The irony-meter has broken. From the Times:

Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984, has been celebrated for decades as a symbol of resistance to oppression, but Russian schoolchildren are now being taught that he behaved “destructively” because of his disobedience.

In what looks like a disturbing return to Soviet attitudes, pupils at schools across the Tomsk region in western Siberia were taught about Smith’s negative tendencies as part of training designed to “raise anti-terrorism awareness”.

1984 was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988 but circulated in clandestine samizdat editions before that and was cherished by dissidents.

It was the most popular fiction download from the website of the Russian online bookseller LitRes in 2022, the year President Putin invaded Ukraine, but officials have tried to claim its popularity was thanks to it being a critique of modern liberalism, rather than communist totalitarianism and other forms of autocracy.

School Number 4, in the city of Tomsk, said in a social media post that children were shown a series of films, including Harry Potter, Batman Begins and the version of 1984 that was released the same year, starring John Hurt.

The sessions were designed to help children work out “why heroes become criminals” and “how to recognise signs of destructive behaviour”, it said.

Children were told that Smith was a “radical” whose destructive bent was evident in the fact that he single-handedly tries to resist a totalitarian regime, he “changes information in official documents, which contradicts the main idea of the party” and he “feels a strong hatred for the party”.

His attempts to “undermine trust towards the party, which leads to a revolution” were also cited.

Irina Grabtsevich, 57, the director of School Number 4, is a member of the Tomsk city council from the United Russia Party, which dominates Russia’s legislatures and slavishly supports Putin.

Under Putin, state bodies such as prosecutors and the investigative committee have consistently been deployed to crush dissent, while state television is used to smear critics of the authorities….

Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said in May 2022: “For many years we thought Orwell was describing totalitarianism. This is one of the global fakes. Orwell wrote about the end of liberalism. He wrote how liberalism would lead humanity into a dead end. He wasn’t writing about the Soviet Union but about the society in which he lived.”

Time to revisit Christopher Hitchens on North Korea and 1984.