ABSTRACT

Since its foundation the Soviet Union has been considered by most people in the West to be a major adversary to our conceptions of a democratic state and society. Following the temporary alliance between the Allies during the Second World War, Western governments have regarded the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries as pursuing policies inimical to the interests of Western states. The West has not only regarded their foreign policies as hostile, but also has viewed their internal political and social organization as illegitimate. Such political conflict in the international sphere has created an environment in which the social and political systems of the major adversaries have been stereotyped in the popular imagination. The image of Soviet society in the eyes of people outside the USSR has been one of an illegitimate totalitarian society in which individual rights have been sacrificed to meet the needs of an allpowerful totalitarian state. George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and 1984, have been powerful symbolic representations of the fate of the masses in socialist states.