In an interview on Totalitarian Russia

Your first choice is George Orwell’s 1984.

I read this, like most people do, when I was in my mid-teens. At that stage I was a classicist and I had no thought of doing anything about Russian history. I think, looking back, this was the book which influenced me more than any other when I came to take up historical study, because of its astonishing insight into totalitarian regimes.

And I think that one of the great things about Orwell’s account of totalitarianism is not just the tremendous power that 20th-century dictatorships have exercised, but also how sordid and squalid the living conditions are for many of the people there. And I’m impressed by how individuals, with any independence of mind, still managed to survive those conditions. In other words, the book looks at how order and disorder co-habit. And I think Orwell, without ever having gone to the USSR, really did understand it from the outside brilliantly.

How do you think he managed that?

I think he did that probably from a lot of his personal experiences, particularly in Spain where he saw how the Spanish Communist Party acted on the orders of the International Communist Party. At the time they were going about exterminating their Communist and Socialist enemies. And he applied this knowledge to what he understood about Soviet foreign, and indeed internal, policy. 

And have you seen any examples of what he wrote about in your own research?

When I read depictions of what a perfect Communist order would look like, written by Communists, all of the nasty underbelly of Communism is kept back. But, over the 1960s and 1970s, more and more accounts came out of the USSR concerning this picture that Orwell drew. People lived cheek by jowl with each other, and there was this extraordinary central power along with sordid demoralising social conditions. Most notably, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago went in the same direction. This almost became the main theme of Soviet literature.

In an interview on Torture

Finally you have chosen a classic, 1984 by George Orwell.

I think torture is not just the physical torture that we all associate with the word. It is also several forms of psychological and mental torture that can happen even on a massive scale.

Of course 1984 came and went and we didn’t have the kind of dramatic tyranny George Orwell predicted. But, perhaps we didn’t have it in 1984 because of his book 35 years earlier. I think it does alert us to the danger of unfettered state power, which under any circumstance always ends up committing violations against individuals and particularly the kind of violation that we associate with the word torture.