We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

That year, Trotsky was disciplining Russian society into a militarized labor force. Pastoral Russia had risen to its newfound volya (free will) but was now struggling against this new yoke. The Bolsheviks were building the new Soviet Man, who would outpace his human peers. The peasantry would bond into the strongest proletariat amalgam. The stuff of daily life was churned through the time and motion studies of the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. Russia was electrified—literally—and the darkest corners of the old life were irradiated with industrial ideas. The year 1920 was perched at the dawn of film, radio, and the automobile. It was also the year that the word robot came into being (originating in the Russian and Czech word rabotat’, which means “to work”). The Bolsheviks with their militaristic, urban-centric, industrial aggression were conquering all of Russia.