Big brother made real [Society]

The author first read 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' in Moscow, in the late 1980s. The book, like all other works by George Orwell, was strictly banned in the USSR. A huge scandal erupted when an American publisher tried to display it on his stand during the International Book Fair in Moscow in the early 1980s. The punishment for being caught in possession of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' could be a prison term. Curiously, that only added to the clandestine pleasure of reading. How could someone, who had never been to the Soviet Union and had never lived in a totalitarian state, describe our life with such poignant precision? The author considers how the vision in the book portrayed everyday life in the USSR.