March 1916, he was sent to the United Kingdom to supervise the construction of icebreakers at the shipyards of Armstrong Whitworth in Walker and Swan Hunter in Wallsend while living in Newcastle upon Tyne. He supervised the building of the Krassin, which retained the distinction of being the most powerful icebreaker in the world into the 1950s. He also worked on the Lenin. Zamyatin later wrote, "My only previous visit to the West had been to Germany. Berlin had impressed me as a condensed, 80-percent version of Petersburg. In England it was quite different: everything was as new and strange as Alexandria and Jerusalem had been some years before." Zamyatin later recalled, "In England, I built ships, looked at ruined castles, listened to the thud of bombs dropped by German Zeppelins, and wrote The Islanders. I regret that I did not see the February Revolution, and know only the October Revolution (I returned to Petersburg, past German submarines, in a ship with lights out, wearing a life belt the whole time, just in time for October). This is the same as never having been in love and waking up one morning already married for ten years or so." Return to Russia : 1917-1931 Zamyatin's The Islanders, satirizing English life, and the similarly themed A Fisher of Men, were both published after his return to Russia. According to Mirra Ginsburg: "In 1917 he returned to Petersburg and plunged into the seething literary activity that was one of the most astonishing by-products of the revolution in ruined, ravaged, hungry, and epidemic-ridden Russia. He wrote stories, plays, and criticism; he lectured on literature and the writer's craft; he participated in various literary projects and committees - many of them initiated and presided over by Maxim Gorky - and served on various editorial boards, with Gorky, Blok, Korney Chukovsky, Gumilev, Shklovsky, and other leading writers, poets, critics, and linguists. And very soon he came under fire from the newly 'orthodox' - the Proletarian Writers who sought to impose on all art the sole criterion of 'usefulness to the revolution.'" But, as the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923 continued, Zamyatin's writings and statements became increasingly satirical and critical toward the Bolshevik party. Even though he was an Old Bolshevik and even though "he accepted the revolution", Zamyatin believed that independent speech and thought are necessary to any healthy society and opposed the Party's increasing suppression