British writer George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”, which is set in a world where totalitarian leaders brainwash their citizens and wage unnecessary wars to present a common enemy to the population, has climbed to the top of electronic book sales in Russia, Reuters reports.

The novel is the most popular fiction book downloaded in 2022 from online bookstore Liters, and the second most popular book in any category, TASS, Russia’s most prominent state news agency, announced on Tuesday.

Orwell’s book was published in 1949, just a few years after the defeat of Nazism in Europe and the start of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc led by the dictator Joseph Stalin.

“1984” was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988.

The British author said he used Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship as a model for the Big Brother cult of personality, whose thought police force citizens to learn “doublethink,” to believe that “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.”

But many see the novel as an echo of the regime imposed by Vladimir Putin in Russia, which eradicated political opposition and independent media from the public sphere during the two decades of the Kremlin leader’s rule.

Kremlin propagandists also rehabilitated the image of Stalin, and Russian tanks entered Ukraine under Soviet flags.

Russia as in “1984”

The Kremlin rejects even the use of the word “war”, calling Russia’s war of aggression a “special military operation”.

High-ranking officials in Moscow continue to maintain that Russia does not wish Ukraine harm, has not attacked a neighboring country, and has not occupied Ukrainian territories illegally annexed by Russia.

Last week, Russian dissident Ilya Yasin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for spreading “false information” about the army after discussing atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Buch.

And last month, Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov calmly stated that Russian forces had not struck civilian targets in Ukraine, despite a wave of kamikaze missile attacks and drone attacks that left millions of Ukrainians without electricity and heat in the dead of winter.

But in typical Orwellian irony, the translator of the new edition of “1984” in Russia sees parallels with the British author’s story elsewhere.

“Orwell, even in his worst nightmares, could not have dreamed that the era of ‘totalitarian liberalism’ or ‘liberal totalitarianism’ would reach the West and that people — individual, isolated individuals — would behave like an angry herd,” said translator Daria Tselovalnikova for the AST publishing house in May.

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