have disappeared down the “memory hole.” At no time hasnany government in the West, above all the United States, attemptednanything remotely resembling this official attempt tonrewrite the past. When World War II broke out and the earliernpolicy of appeasement was totally discredited, no one attemptednto claim that it had never existed. There was, in fact, somenbrooding about the mistaken policy. Many loose ends remainednloose. When the wartime Soviet alliance was in fullnsway and the plea went out for Russian War Relief, there werenalways voices to be heard chiding mordantiy, “And what happenednto Finnish War Relief?”nBut, central as it is to 1984, the rewriting of history is onlynone of hundreds of the book’s themes taken straight from thenmodel of Soviet totalitarianism. On the novel’s second pagenwe hear of the current “Three Year Plan”—^whereas the SovietnUnion was famous for its Five Year Plans. Within the next fewnpages we encounter references to “shortages” (still a featurenof the Soviet system), the feict that there were “no longer anynlaws” (true de fecto of the Soviet Union for crimes against thenstate and de jure of commimist China in all areas until only thenlast few years), “the Party,” the “Inner Party,” “forced-laborncamps,” the daily “Two Minute Hate” (here he anticipatednPeking, which in 1950 was already instituting “Hate Weeks”),nand, of course, the “Thought Police” (this term borrowednfrom the Japanese, who, under the military clique that lednthem in World War II, literally had “Thought Police”). Butnperhaps the most telltale figure of all is “Emmanuel Goldstein,”nEnemy of the People:nthe renegade and backslider who… had been one of the leadingnfigures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself,nand then had engaged in counterrevolutionary activitiesn… All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, actsnof sabotage, heresies, deviation, sprang directly out of hisnteaching.nGoldstein is such a transparent surrogate for Trotsky that itnis hard to imagine what figure even Erich Fromm could havenfound to offer as the personage that President Reagan, for example,nmight currentiy use for his “Goldstein.” Even the suggestionnis ludicrous. And all these examples are taken fromnonly the first 10 pages of 1984. As the novel proceeds, itsnhatred for a system of govenunent which aspires to total con-nFeatured in the March 1984nissue of Chronicles of Culture:nJorge Luis Borges’s address on thenoccasion of the presentation of thenfirst T.S. Eliot Award for CreativenWriting to him, December 8, 1983.n1984nnntrol of aU institutions of society and every one of its citizensnbecomes even more intense.nJ. 984, of course, was not a gloomy Prediction of Things TonCome; it was Orwell’s framing of the horrors of totalitarianism,nparticularly of the Soviet variety. But as a rou^prediction ofnthe destiny of a communist society it still has much to recommendnit. Although it has never ^ain sunk to the depths of thenderanged coercion of the Stalin period, with irmocent mennconfessing in show trials to crimes they had never committed,nthe nature of the Soviet state has not changed fiindamentally.nAfter all these decades, and all these Five Year Plans, and all ofnKhrushchev’s promises to “overtake” the West economicallynin 20 years, it still remains a society of scarcity. Despite thenhopes pitmed to “the Thaw” and “Detente” and the optimistsnwho thought that increased contact with the West wouldn”liberalize” the Soviet system, it has not been liberalized. ThenSoviet state offers virtually none of the freedoms promised innits own Constitution but continues to rule by repression.nPeople still do not speak freely and sincerely to anyone outsidena circle of the most trusted friends—^if even then. Classnstratifications exist, despite vigorous ofl&cial protests to thencontrary, with what Orwell called the “Itmer Party” now oftennreferred to as the “Red Bourgeoisie” or even the “Red Aristocracy.”nDefectors still move from East to West, and not vicenversa. No one, as Senator Moynihan says, “swims throughnshark infested waters to reach the shores of East Germany.”nAnd yet Orwell, if we take his work as even a nightmare projectionnof a communist society, was oflf the mark on two majornpoints: (1) the ability of a totalitarian state to obliterate memoryn(“He who controls the past controls the fiitare; he whoncontrols the present controls the past”); and (2) his femousn”doublethink.”nOne of the spectacular findings of Antonov-Ovseyenko, thenSoviet dissident who had access to some of the unpublishednfindings of Khrushchev’s commission investigating the crimesnof Stalin, was that—rafter 20 years of saturation state propagandanclaiming that Kirov had been assassinated by Trotskyitenagents, which tri^ered the Great Purge—some of the commissionnmembers were told in Leningrad with a smile that,nwhy, “everyone in Leningrad” knew that Kirov had been killednby Stalin. Memory had not been destroyed. The people knew.nIn Poland, where resistance to official commimist mythologynhas been strengthened by powerfiil nationalist hatred of Russia,nofficial myths have had even less impact. I have never met anPole, in Poland, who did not know the true circimistances ofnthe 1944 Warsaw Rising by the anticommunist Home Army,nwhen Soviet forces waited with folded arms on the other sidenof the Vistula for the Germans to put down the revolt andnslaughter a quarter of a million Poles. Driving by the Vistulansome years before Solidarity, a Pole pointed across the riverncontinued on page 38nJanuary 1984n