Nineteen Eighty-Four is the year which had been earmarked by British writer, George Orwell, for a mature state of leftist totalitarianism, as instantiated on Airstrip One, a socialist dictatorship formerly known as Great Britain. 

In reality, and perhaps in no small measure due to the horrifying vision which Orwell had put forward in 1949, the year 1984 is associated with Perestroika, and the beginnings of an earnest movement of political reforms in the Soviet Union, closely associated with the premiership of Mikhail Gorbachev.