that the end justifies the means. In The Flood, he gives the central place to individual passions against a background that reflects the vast changes of the time as marginally and obliquely as they are reflected in the consciousness of his characters - residents of an outlying suburb, whose knowledge of the history around them is limited to such facts as the deteriorating quality of coal, the silent machines, the lack of bread." In 1923, Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript of his dystopian science-fiction novel We to be smuggled to E.P. Dutton and Company in New York City. After being translated into English by Russian refugee Gregory Zilboorg, the novel was published in 1924. Then, in 1927, Zamyatin went much further. He smuggled the original Russian text to Marc Lvovich Slonim (1894–1976), the editor of an anti-communist Russian émigré magazine and publishing house based in Prague. To the fury of the Soviet State, copies of the Czechoslovakian edition began being smuggled back to the USSR and secretly passed from hand to hand. Zamyatin's secret dealings with Western publishers triggered a mass offensive by the Soviet State against him. These attitudes, writings, and actions, which the Party considered Deviationism made Zamyatin's position increasingly difficult as the 1920s wore on. Zamyatin became, according to Mirra Ginsburg, one of "the first to become the target of concerted hounding by the Party critics and writers." According to Mirra Ginsburg: "Zamyatin's vision was too far-reaching, too nonconformist, and too openly expressed to be tolerated by the purveyors of official and compulsory dogma. Very early he was branded by Trotsky as an internal émigré. He was repeatedly attacked as a bourgeois intellectual, out of tune with the revolution. When the Party-line Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) gained full sway in the latter 1920s, with the end of the New Economic Policy and the introduction of the first Five Year Plan, it set out systematically to end all originality and independence in the arts. Art had to serve the ends of the Party or it had no right to exist." Max Eastman, an American Communist who had similarly broken with his former beliefs, described the Politburo's war against Zamyatin in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform. According to Mirra Ginsburg: "All the instruments of power were brought into use in the campaign for conformity. Faced with grim alternatives, most of Zamyatin's erstwhile pupils and colleagues yielded