Yevgeny Zamyatin

The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin abandoned Christianity early and joined the Bolsheviks, enduring arrest, beatings, imprisonment, and exile under the Tsar. The October Revolution brought no relief: he found the All-Union Communist Party's enforced conformity and rising totalitarianism just as suffocating. In 1921 he published We, a dystopian science fiction novel set in a futuristic police state that became the first work banned by Soviet censorship. Zamyatin smuggled it West; the Party and Union of Soviet Writers mounted a campaign of defamation and blacklisting so total he petitioned Stalin directly for exit. He died in poverty in Paris in 1937, but his samizdat writings kept circulating underground, lighting the path for generations of dissidents who followed.