Thus, not only is this book not an attack on Communism, the Benefactor is not an analog of Stalin or other Communist big men. We should remember that Zamyatin wrote in the early days of Bolshevism, and before any example existed of the modern cult of personality. The ideology of OneState is not Communism, or any other modern ideology that actually gained traction in real life. OneState aims to order the life of man rationally, in contrast to the disordered irrationality of past ages, that led to war, disease, and suchlike unclean and inefficient happenings. It will be, for those unknown peoples in space, “the fiery Tamerlane of happiness.” The theme of calculus is shot through this book, and the purpose of the rocket is to “integrate the indefinite equation of the universe”-that is, to subject the rest of the universe to the perfection that is OneState, to turn the natural curves of the universe into the straight line and finite quantity of OneState. It is not random that D-503’s rocket is named INTEGRAL. Nobody ever goes beyond the Green Wall-not because the wilderness is a blasted wasteland, but rather because it is the opposite, an area of uncontrolled growth, a riot of plants and animals. All construction within is also of glass, both a technological achievement and a means of ensuring every citizen may be observed. OneState is a single city, surrounded by an impenetrable glass wall, the Green Wall. Why does D-503 consider OneState perfect? It is the twenty-sixth century OneState is two hundred years old, and followed two hundred years of war that killed the vast majority of Earth’s population. But D-503’s journal turns out to be, without his intent, a journal of his awakening. He decides to simply record what he sees around him, because what he sees is the “mathematically perfect life of OneState.” To speak of it is to herald its perfection.

D-503, along with other members of the citizenry, has been ordered by the Benefactor to create intellectual cargo for INTEGRAL, to be delivered to inhabitants of other planets in order to propagate the ideology of OneState.

D-503 is a citizen of OneState, under the absolute rule of, apparently, one man, the Benefactor. He is a mathematician and the Chief Engineer of a spaceship, named INTEGRAL, being prepared for imminent launch to explore Venus, Mars, and beyond. We is written as a journal of sorts, the stream of consciousness of a man named D-503.

I warn you now, this entire review is one big spoiler.