Communism In George Orwell's 1984

George Orwell’s 1984 is obviously a work of fiction, imagined by a man with a anguish for society and a belief that the future is bleak. Likewise, the continual growth of control and the increasingly terrible living conditions inside of the USSR led to a high demand of strong uniformity; comradery was the central point of communism. In 1984, the central point of law enforcement came from the Ministry of Love, while in the USSR, the GULAG, the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, was the state run prison camp system (“Gulag”). The dystopian nightmare of the Ministry of Love’s imprisonment in Orwell’s 1984 were realized in the Soviet Union’s GULAG as evident by the focus of individual punishment, crime deterrence, and post imprisonment.

Approached in different ways, each set out to punish incredibly the crimes of those working against the party, whether it be INGSOC or CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). The Ministry of Love set prisoners into psychological trances, tricking the inhabitants into the nervous worrying of what is to come next and what will happen. Physical beatings and electrocutions occur daily, wearing the prisoner down to accept the doctrine presented in front of them. Winston lay awake for days famished and worn to the bones, a shell of his former self. His prison guard, O’Brien placed himself in front of the mirror to see his animal lifestyle he had adopted, he was simply not a person, but an animal (Orwell 271). Russian prisoners faced similar outcomes through different processes. Often in the outskirts of Siberia, a vast empty land of freezing winters, the prisoners were shipped hundreds of miles from civilization to work in camps with prisoners with similarly “severe” crimes. The prisoners severely starved, as a former inmate V. T. Shalamov expressed, “Each time they brought in the soup... it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick we couldn’t believe it and ate it as slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been

For 1984, the idea was simple, all prisoners would die some day. “The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment. The tradition -- the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said -- was that they shot you from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell” (Orwell 297). The length of the lifespan of prisoners varied, some might live long happy lives under Big Brother. The citizens learned to conform and accept that may, two plus two can equal 5 if the party wanted. Individual thought for life after the Ministry of Love was entirely nonexistent. Nonetheless, ultimately every prisoner will be killed by the thought police. Each prisoner was brainwashed and unlike how they were before; the psychiatric effect was also noticeable in those who survived the GULAG. Death was common in the days and weeks following release, but those who survived were shells of their former selves. “The psychology of post-Gulag lives also differed markedly. Some returnees had been so traumatised they remained forever fearful, concealing their past, refusing to discuss it even with family members, and shunning fellow survivors. They became submissive Soviet citizens, ‘their fear of their own thoughts, their dread of being rearrested, were so overwhelming that they seemed more truly and