Orwell, and Aldous Huxley in 'Brave New World', were respectively writing just after (1948) and before (1931) the terrifying manifestations of a new totalitarianism and a global confrontation of ideologies in the last century's total war.
From this perspective, I found 'We' far less of a political novel than those it has inspired. Unlike some of those offspring, OneState is not evidently derived from any one nation of Zamyatin's day, but the parallels with the regulated lives many of us live in the big cities of today's "developed world" become more pertinent with each passing decade as nature is driven out of the metropolis.
Zamyatin wrote the book as no enemy of the Soviet State, though it was swiftly perceived that way and went unpublished in any faithful rendition of his original text in Russia itself until 1988, 57 years after Stalin allowed him in exile in Paris, disabused by the absence of creative outlets and the conformity of Soviet thought.
'We' is instead an entertaining, sometimes funny and seminal work of science fiction, where the core of social satire lies in a simple arithmetical challenge I-330 puts to D-503 as the tale nears its climax.
Zamyatin's biographers tell us he much admired another of the first great "sci-fi writers", H.G. Wells, whose influence is evident, and the naïf D-503 also has a little in common with Voltaire's wide-eyed Candide until he finds himself increasingly distanced from a society founded on a scientific ideal.

In our 21st-century societies, scientific thinking has to many minds dethroned traditional religious notions. Developments in medicine and nanotechnology have given a new twist to the concept of human perfectibility as a taming of the genetic "freedom" exercised in the evolution of the species to its current point.
I found 'We' a particularly stimulating read in the immediate wake of some catching up on current thinking in genetics and biology, most especially the conclusion that any further evolution of Homo sapiens — if we avoid rendering our world uninhabitable first — will be determined primarily by our technologies, medical science and socio-cultural achievements.
Beyond the Marxist model Zamyatin adopted, beyond the manic consumer capitalism of our day, the concepts of utopia and dystopia have assumed a new relevance, drawing on developments scarcely conceivable until they began happening in the latter half of the 20th century.
According to the cover of the British edition, one of my blogheroines, the wide-ranging writer Ursula K. Le Guin (her site), described 'We' as "the best single work of science fiction yet written". Ever wary of superlatives, I'd simply rate it among the best SF books I've yet read. If this were to be an essay of the order of Patrick Parrinder's 'Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells' (Science Fiction Studies, 1973), I would digress into a similar piece contrasting 'We' with the book I lent Stuart in exchange, Le Guin's own 'The Dispossessed' (1974).
In that profoundly influential novel of ideas, much richer in character, the physicist hero Shevek declares:

"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go and unbuild walls."