We

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire, most famous for his 1921 novel 'We', a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, he was deeply disturbed by the policies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) following the October Rvolution. 'We' became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board and Zamyatin arranged for it to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, he has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents. 'We' was translated into English by Russian refugee Gregory Zilboorg and published by E P Dutton & Co of New York in 1924. In 1927 Zamyatin smuggled the original Russian text to a publishing house in Prague and to the fury of the Soviet State copies of the Czech edition found their way back into the USSR where they were secretly passed from hand to hand. As a result Zamyatin was blacklisted from publishing anything in his homeland. In 1931 he made a direct appeal to Stalin requesting permission to leave the Soviet Union, also enlisting the support of Gorky, and he and his wife went on to settle in Paris where he died in poverty of a heart attack in 1937.