When George Orwell worked at the end of the Second World War and immediately after it as an editor of a London newspaper, he wrote a series of articles in which he looked into the future with a unique perspective. The prediction of massive obsolescence of books and newspapers (reading in general) in his articles “Books Against Cigarettes” and “Hindering Literature” is thoughtfully apt. Even more insightful, however, is his use of the term “cold war” and his analysis of the possible context in his essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” (1945), which accurately delineates entire decades of future history. Reflecting on the new “atomic” era (which had just begun two and a half months earlier, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), he wrote about the consequences of the policies of the state, which, he writes, “impregnable, at the same time is in a permanent state of” cold wars with their neighbors. Speaking of a deadly new weapon of mass destruction, he notes: “…Because this object is as difficult to find and as expensive to produce as a warship, it is likely to end large-scale hostilities and maintain indefinitely” peace, which this is not the world.”

A year later, Churchill gave a lecture in Missouri, USA, in which he spoke about the geographical line separating “Western freedom” from “Russian tyranny.” He called it the “Iron Curtain”.

Over the next four decades, the popular imagination in the West captured this “world that was not a world” in countless creative forms around two themes: espionage and the threat of nuclear holocaust. Ian Fleming sent his James Bond character to meet dark Russian agents, John Le Carré wrote (1963) his famous novel The Spy Came Back from the Cold starring a British agent operating in East Berlin, and Stanley Kubrick directed (1964) ) by Peter Sellers in a merciless satire called “SOS The Pentagon is calling Moscow.”

Orwell’s thoughts in You and the Atomic Bomb (1945) again sound prophetic.

More recently, in the 1980s, a graphic novel by the English comedian Raymond Briggs entitled When the Wind Blows (1982), published in our country by Babylon, tells the story of the Soviet Union’s nuclear attack on Britain from the point of view of an elderly couple, while Cold War mythology infiltrates the nascent digital world of video games with 1984’s Raid on Moscow. In this era’s American home video game, the player’s goal was to prevent a Russian nuclear weapons attempt. attack an American city and, ultimately, aggressively reach Moscow.

The (Cold) War “like a game” is also depicted in the image accompanying this text, which comes from an unexpected place: an advertisement in the pages of an American humor magazine, the popular Archie and its December issue. 1962. On the pages of such youth publications, a whole generation of kids became the patron (and customer) of the industry of pseudo-inventions and “inventions” – from “hoaxes” and “real laser guns” to ghosts with “glowing” eyes in the dark “and X-ray glasses. One of these product categories were board games such as Cowboy Horror pictured here. For a dollar and a half (about fifteen, in current terms) you could get 132 plastic boats, “two full fleets in gray and green,” as the model proudly “screams” in one place, and somewhere announces that they will be sent to you and “a comparative map of the two most powerful navies in the world, the United States and Russia.” Never mind that this illustration, with its carefully considered use of space, color and typography, was far more moving than the actual game it advertised. It was enough of an exciting fantasy that in a few days the postman would leave something magical on the doorstep, and that somewhere far away, in the eastern lands of Europe, a large “red bear” was wandering.

Sixty years later, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rhetoric about the use of nuclear weapons, the bear growls again. But no one wants to play war games anymore. At the same time, George Orwell’s thoughts in the 1945 book You and the Atomic Bomb, seven decades later, again sound frighteningly prophetic.