We (novel)

We (Мы, 1920) is a novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was written in response to the author's personal experiences with the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. We is a dystopic satire, generally considered to be the grand daddy of the genre and direct inspiration for Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). It takes the totalitarian and conformative aspects of Communism to an extreme conclusion, depicting a state that believes that free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that citizen's lives should be controlled with mathematical precision. The story is told in the diary of "D-503" (the hero's name), in which he describes his work building a spaceship The Integral, whose purpose is to seek out and convert any extraterrestrial civilizations to the happiness that the One State has discovered, and his misadventures with a resistance group that seeks to do away with the Benefactor and his regime.

The novel was banned by Stalin and got Zamyatin arrested, though he eventually was exiled to Paris.