Posted on 10/26/2025 11:19:07 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Long before mass surveillance, social credit systems, and the algorithmic manipulation of truth became part of our daily lives, Russian writers were warning us. Not with data charts or manifestos—but with novels, plays, and poems that seemed to peer through the veil of their own turbulent times and glimpse something terrifyingly familiar: our present.
...They didn’t predict flying cars or space tourism. Instead, they foresaw how totalitarian regimes would manipulate language, how the human spirit could be engineered, and how the very idea of truth could be dismantled and rebuilt at the whim of the state.
...Yet, their work is not merely grim. Within the warnings are acts of artistic resistance—unflinching attempts to preserve human dignity, memory, and conscience in the face of oblivion. To read them now is to realize that literature is not just a reflection of the past. It is a flashlight pointed at the road ahead.
1. Yevgeny Zamyatin – We (1921)
Prediction: Total surveillance, data-driven conformity, algorithmic control of love and desire
2. Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Devils (Demons) (1872)
Prediction: Radicalization, ideological terrorism, and political extremism as a form of moral vacuum
3. Alexander Herzen – From the Other Shore (1849)
Prediction: The emptiness of Western liberalism, the disillusionment of progress, and the cyclical nature of history
5. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (written 1928–40)
Prediction: The collision of truth and propaganda, artistic censorship, spiritual suppression under totalitarianism
6. Andrei Platonov – The Foundation Pit (written 1930, not published until decades later)
Prediction: Dehumanization through bureaucracy, dystopian state planning, and the moral collapse of revolutionary utopias
7. Boris Pasternak – Doctor Zhivago (1957)
Prediction: The personal costs of history, the disappearance of private life under state ideology, and the fragility of beauty in times of upheaval
(Excerpt) Read more at polyglottistlanguageacademy.com ...
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No Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?.............
Good list
Solzhenitsyn didn’t predict the future, he told the truth about the past and present when that was illegal.
“What’s past is prologue”...................
“The misery of nations is caused not by particular persons, but by the particular order of Society under which the people are so bound up together that they find themselves all in the power of a few men, or more often in the power of one single man: a man so perverted by his unnatural position as arbiter of the fate and lives of millions, that he is always in an unhealthy state, and always suffers more or less from a mania of self-aggrandizement.”
https://theconversation.com/how-should-dostoevsky-and-tolstoy-be-read-during-russias-war-against-ukraine-179932
I just ordered: Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Devils (Demons) (1872)
Wish me luck. It’s a monster.
Definitely not an overnight read.
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