There's a story that the soviet Communist Party actually circulated copies of George Orwell's 1984, not as a warning against how totalitarianism could go wrong, but as a manual for how to implement it more effectively. I'm not sure if there's any truth to it.
Is the Room 101 fear of the "middle class" that they could be sent down to the "working class"? Young Blair (as Orwell was known then) and his classmates were surprised to run into a former classmate of theirs who had been rusticated — and seemed much happier for it.
