In his famous article ‘Politics and the English language’ (1946), Orwell drew together questions of liberty and questions of style. Obscure and cloudy writing, he thought, was a means of hiding the true nature of things from the reader, and was thus a form of political manipulation, or ‘brainwashing’:

Orwell concluded that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’. Such problems, in his opinion, were not confined to English:

Orwell's attitude to the ‘mechanisation’ of language under authoritarian régimes, which was shortly afterwards to be the inspiration for ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four (and if a great deal in the dystopian world of the novel is derived from the symbolism of Evgenii Zamiatin's We, the characterisation of this world of ‘absolute aesthetic submission’ (Zamiatin 2011: 141) from a linguistic point of view must be regarded as Orwell's own achievement), had in turn a great influence on the perception of ‘totalitarian society’ by political scientists in the USA and Western Europe and in Soviet dissident circles in the 1970s and 1980s, and also in the post-Soviet period. It became a commonplace that Soviet language was an extremely specific expression of the régime's ‘power game’. As a correlative, the opinion emerged that it would be enough to reform public language in order to create a new public (what in Soviet times would have been called a new social milieu (obshchestvennost).