If the billboards in Ivanovo are to be believed, Russia’s really going places.
“Record harvest!”
“More than 2000km of roads repaired in Ivanovo Region!”
“Change for the Better!”
In this town, a four-hour drive from Moscow, a giant banner glorifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine covers the entire wall of an old cinema. With pictures of soldiers and a slogan:
“To Victory!”
These posters depict a country marching towards economic and military success.
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But there is one place in Ivanovo that paints a very different picture of today’s Russia.
The sign above it reads The George Orwell Library.
Inside, the tiny library offers a selection of books on dystopian worlds and the dangers of totalitarianism.
“The situation now in Russia is similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four,” librarian Alexandra Karaseva tells me.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party manipulates people’s perception of reality, so that citizens of Oceania believe that "war is peace" and "ignorance is strength".
Russia today has a similar feel about it. From morning until night, the state media here claims that Russia’s war in Ukraine is not an invasion, but a defensive operation; that Russian soldiers are not occupiers, but liberators; that the West is waging war on Russia, when, in reality, it was the Kremlin that ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“That’s like Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It was a local businessman, Dmitry Silin, who opened the library two years ago.
“Most of my generation had no experience of grassroots democracy,” recalls Alexandra, who is 68. “We helped destroy the Soviet Union but failed to build democracy.
Perhaps if my generation had read Ninety Eighty-Four, it would have acted differently.”
Eighteen-year-old Dmitry Shestopalov has read Ninety Eighty-Four. Now he volunteers at the library
Alexandra Karaseva is the first to admit that the library has few visitors.
By contrast, I find a large crowd in the centre of Ivanovo. It’s not Big Brother people have stopped to listen to. It’s a Big Band.
In bright sunshine an orchestra is playing classic Soviet melodies and people start dancing to the music. Chatting to the crowd I realise that some Russians are more than willing to believe what the billboards are telling them, that Russia’s on the up.
“I’m happy with the direction Russia’s heading in,” pensioner Vladimir tells me. “We’re becoming more independent. Less reliant on the West.”
Orwell wrote what he knew: working for the BBC