After February 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his so-called special military operation—a full-scale invasion of Ukraine—the popularity of George Orwell’s 1984, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime built on mass surveillance and constant propaganda, soared in Russia. As Christmas approached that year, one St. Petersburg bookstore tied together copies of 1984 as a garland above the cash register. Another set up an entrance display of patriotic books—along with a mug depicting Orwell’s face and a caption referring to the novel’s shadowy, supposedly omnipotent leader. “Let Big Brother think that there is tea in this mug,” it read.

The trendy Moscow bookshop Respublika placed Orwell’s works all over the store. In a quiet protest against the Kremlin’s demands to reject all cultural products from “unfriendly countries”—including France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—Respublika continued to sell Ed Sheeran’s new album and the Rolling Stones’ old vinyl. Its bestsellers included American and British authors, along with Russians who had fled the country, such as Boris Akunin and Dmitry Bykov. But in the years since the war began, Akunin and Bykov have been accused of “extremism,” their works added to an official list of 5,000 banned titles. Respublika took those books off the shelves and relocated the not-yet-forbidden Orwell to the second floor, in case a government inspector checked in.

Restrictions of all kinds have expanded over the past four years—not just book bans but reduced access to social media, crackdowns on protest, and measures to render the LGBT community invisible and feminism illegitimate. Russia’s “foreign agent” law, established in 2012 to identify individuals and organizations that received international funding, has become a tool to criminally prosecute and ban from public life anyone who disagrees with the state. In early 2022, 300 people and organizations were on the notorious list of foreign agents; now, the number is over 1,100. But even as the screws have tightened, Russians haven’t stopped reading. One bookstore chain reported that 1984 was its most stolen book in 2023. In the first half of 2025, according to the same bookstore, it was surpassed only by theft of copies of the Russian constitution, which forbids censorship and guarantees freedom of thought, the right to speak, and access to information. “We read Orwell for his reflection of reality, and the constitution as a beautiful utopia,” Russians grimly joke.

To visit Russia over the past four years has been to observe the consolidation of a dictatorship in real time—to answer the question readers confront in 1984, wondering how Big Brother’s gaze became so penetrating and relentless. At the start of the invasion, the state lacked the means to quell all possible opposition, and so it suppressed selectively. People self-censored, even as many found ways to express their distaste for Russia’s path. But in the time since, Moscow has built a larger repressive apparatus. It has cultivated a climate of fear and uncertainty that encouraged many Russians to silence not just themselves but also one another. The accumulation of subtle changes on the part of both the state and society has led Russia deeper and deeper into tyranny—a cycle that seems unlikely to break as long as Putin’s regime pursues the kind of total control that until recently seemed to exist only in Russia’s communist past or in Orwell’s fiction.

Before February 2022, Russian society was fairly open. Official media was under state control, but independent outlets flourished, the Internet had no restrictions, and people could read or watch what they wanted. When the war broke out, mass protests ensued; people were dumbfounded that Russia would launch an invasion of a neighboring country.

Dissent was immediately met with retaliation. In the first few months, more than 15,000 antiwar protesters, including more than 400 minors, were detained. Russian citizens found themselves under de facto martial law. Access to Meta, Instagram, and Twitter (now X) was criminalized. Foreign news sites offering opposing views, such as the BBC and Radio Free Europe, were blocked. Russia’s own independent media outlets, including the radio station Echo Moskvy, Dozhd TV, and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, were banned within weeks. Sharing anything about the war other than the official Ministry of Defense’s narratives was immediately made punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

In the spring of 2022, there were many incidents in which the state responded with full force to mild displays of disobedience. One Muscovite, Konstantin Goldman, was detained for holding a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace at a stone memorializing fallen soldiers from Ukraine during World War II in the Alexander Gardens, near the Kremlin. He was accused of potentially planning to overthrow the Russian government, detained, and fined. In St. Petersburg, a young artist, Aleksandra Skochilenko, was sentenced to seven years in prison for crimes against the armed forces because she replaced store price tags with hand-drawn antiwar messages. (She was released in 2024 and flown to Germany as part of an international prisoner exchange.)

These protests failed to move Putin. The president continued his fight on behalf of what he calls Russia’s “distinct civilization”—the idea that Russia, although partially located in Europe, must keep its distance from the West. Many writers, journalists, scholars, artists, IT specialists, and other white-collar workers who disagreed with the Kremlin’s interpretation saw no point in protesting and fled the country. Most everybody else pretended to fall in line. In December 2021, according to the independent pollster Levada, less than 50 percent of Russians believed the country was going in the right direction. In March 2022, 70 percent tamely reported their support.

Initially, the Kremlin made efforts to pacify the public without resorting to near-total suppression. Putin expected a small, quick, and successful war to keep Kyiv in Moscow’s orbit, so he used the term “special military operation” to avoid the word “war.” Any fighting, Russians were assured, would happen elsewhere. The government’s system of control was not yet prepared to handle widespread discontent, so it settled on a social contract of sorts: citizens who submitted to the state, even just by tacitly accepting its war, could go on about their daily lives. Soon, everything should return to normal. This created a dual reality: Stalinesque oppression awaits those who step out of line, but those who do not protest can read Orwell and carry on with their lives.

Yet war became an ever-expanding presence in Russians’ reality. Shelling has increased, Ukrainian drones fly all the way across the country, oil refineries are attacked,........

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