A very partial reclamation project

...Even as the introduction to the Literary Gazette extract acknowledged that 1984 bore relevance to Stalinist Russia, it suggested that Orwell's main target was fascism...

...Meanwhile, 1984 was trumpeted as a satirical portrait of the U.S.-with the Thought Police as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, the Pentagon as the Ministry of Peace, etc...

...Recently Latvians, Lithuanians, and Georgians have protested against proposed amendments to the Soviet Constitution...

...Recent months have witnessed the serialization of Yevgeni Zamyatin's We, Boris Pasternak's Dr...

...No mention is made of the fable's historical referents...

...Ljfe does not begin at seventy-one...

...Skeptical Benjamin, the donkey of Animal Farm-like George Orwell- would not be fooled...

...They figure that they can master the present by leaving the past unmastered, i.e., by circumscribing the Stalin era and merely adjusting the official record...

...In late November, just weeks after Rodnik published the secret codicils of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact-revealing the sordid details of Stalin's secret deal with Hitler reading to the illegal 1940 annexation of the Baltic republics-the sitting parliament of the Estonian Republic declared its sovereignty from Moscow...

...The most recent "expression of opinion" has been the Azeri-fomented civil war in the non-Russian southern republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia...

...The protests are part of perestroika," Gorbachev explained weakly during his December visit in Paris...

...Unlike Orwell's earlier phases of reception, the Soviet intelligentsia today appears open to approaching 1984 as a politically committed artwork inviting the Soviet Union to criticize itself along with the novel...

...And yet, given that Orwell's two satires have sold more than 40 million copies in sixty-five languages (more than any other pair of books by a single author in history) and his status as the keenest Western critic of the Soviet system under Stalin, their publication possesses much wider significance...

...All this involves much more than misleading literary criticism or historical inaccuracies...

...In the 1950s, like "Goldstein" in Oceania, "Orwell" wasa bogeyman word in the Communist press...

...The erstwhile Enemy of Mankind emerged, mirabile dictu, Comrade Orwell (as the Anglo-American Left, including leading Marxists [Raymond Williams], post-structuralist radicals [Christopher Norris], and radical feminists [Daphne Patai], were loudly downing him and laying much of the blame for the postwar failures of Western socialism at his feet...

...The Literary Gazette drawing could well have portrayed the history of Orwell's reception in the USSR: until the 1980s it was always Hate Week for Orwell in the Soviet Union...

...It is "directed against those who make a mockery of [socialist] ideals, openly or in a disguised way, against political demagoguery and political adventurism...

...A 1983 issue of the Soviet weekly New Times hailed Orwell as a worker's hero who "shared dry crusts with the clochards of Paris" and in 1984 took "the exact measure of real capitalism...

...In a single passing phrase, the editors add that Animal Farm refers to "the Moscow trials of 1937" as well...

...How far can Gorbachev afford to let such "protests" go...

...Zhivago, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Andrei Platanov's Chevengur, and Anatoly Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, all of them printed entire as part of Gorbachev's heralded crusade to reevaluate the Stalin years and enlist intellectual and popular support for a thoroughgoing rejvamping of the Soviet bureaucracy and the Communist party...

...And yet, only after seven decades is the Soviet Union at last seriously confronting what the Germans refer to as die unbewaltigte Vergangenheit, "the unmastered past...

...From a Western standpoint, the appearance of the 1984 extract and the announcement of a complete edition of the novel by mid-1989 are, of course, most welcome...

...Perhaps even more embarrassing for the Soviets is Animal Farm, whose "concrete address" could not be clearer...

...In 1983-84 the "mutability of the past" became complete...

...Pravda and Izvestia misidentified him as an American and called him "a literary police agent" and "a venal writer on orders...from Wall Street...

...However, William Pfaff has noted that, unlike the case of Germany and the Nazi revolution, Soviet authorities have no watershed event by which to disclaim continuity and thereby disavow their past: the Soviet Communist party has ruled without a break since 1917...

...How far can the unwriting of the rewritten history go before it subverts the party's very claim to embody and interpret "historical truth...

...Not yet, it would seem...

...These publication events are only two of the many cultural initiatives in the phenomenal reform campaign undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev...

...Ideas have consequences that are not easily calibrated...

...Indeed, one might have assumed that the one-to-one correspondences between historical events and this biting allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution and postrevolutionary era would have been inescapable...

...Numerous references to and even reviews of Animal Farm and 1984 have appeared in the Soviet press since the late 1940s...

...Thus Sergei Zalygin, editor of Novy Mir, could write: "It's possible that Orwell wrote his book with a concrete address-the address of socialism...

...How will it appear...

...How far can Gorbachev's "new thinking" proceed before it undercuts a family tree traceable to the Revolution, and thereby threatens the foundations of the Soviet political system...

...More concerned with economic reconstruction and party reform than with literary policy, they reason that any harm done to Soviet claims of legitimacy by the publication of "mere" fiction about the "quickly receding" past will be outweighed by gains in credibility and popular support for perestroika...

...He asked a difficult question: Couldn't fascism find fertile ground in England and, if so, how soon...

...Readers will find it "impossible to support" the fable's portrait of a time of "exultant tyranny...

...The decision to issue an unabridged edition of 1984 in the literary monthly Novy Mir (New World) in upcoming months follows similar gestures toward several long-suppressed anti-Stalinist novels by Soviet writers...

...Has it...

...With the thawing out of the Cold War in the 1960s, he was usually ignored as an "unperson...

...Despite the frequent and shrill castigation of his work in party organs (Pravda dubbed him "Enemy of Mankind"), none of his books has ever been officially published in the USSR, or in any East European nation aligned with Moscow...

...People have tried many times to connect Animal Farm to our history, but such efforts are biased, not to mention that they water down the author's intention...

...Glas-nost and perestroika have permitted people to express their opinions on problems which have accumulated over the years...

...This may be wishful thinking...

...Beneath the excerpt was a stunning drawing of a jackboot stamping on Winston Smith's Upturned face...

...But then come the old appeals to historical realism and universalism...

...The anonymous introduction to the excerpt in the Literary Gazette conceded, if somewhat obliquely, that Stalinist Russia had served as a model for 1984, and it also frankly criticized the party for its long-standing proscriptions against the novel...

...But until recently, an official import ban existed on Orwell's work, Soviet citizens were jailed for possessing his books, and tourists had their copies seized upon entry to the Soviet Union...

...but the more that the historical truth emerges and does evince an unbroken succession of party coverups, the more difficult become party efforts to "contain" the horrific past and the less secure become party claims to legitimacy in the present...

...But the disingenuous treatment given the books by the Soviet press also suggests how far glasnost has yet to go before it truly signifies "openness...

...There should be no forgotten names and blank pages in Soviet history," declared Gorbachev in a much-quoted statement last year...

...Thus the party and the Soviet system, not just one man and his ' 'cult of personality," are in some sense responsible for "vaporizing" 17 million Enemies of Mankind in the 1930s and 1940s...

...The "embarrassment" about Animal Farm and 1984 concerns nothing less than how to connect the Leninist-Stalinist past with the Gor-bachevite present...

...But the September Nedelya notes only that Animal Farm is "surprisingly contemporary...

...Likewise, the March and July issues of Rodnik, published by the Latvian Communist party, blatantly contradict Orwell's statement (in the original Ukrainian preface of 1947) that his main goal in Animal Farm was to "expose the myth" that "Russia is a Socialist country.'' Instead Rodnik declared that Animal Farm pertains to Hitler's June 1934 purge of Ernst Roehm and the S.A., and to the 1937-38 liquidation of the anarchist militias in the Spanish Civil War...

...Thus arose the shape of the novel.'' Indeed, neither Stalin nor Stalinism is specifically mentioned in the introduction--although-mutatis mutandis-Big Brother is likened to Chairman Mao, Hate Week is identified with Islam, and the "totalitarian shadowing" of the population by means of "the newest electronic equipment" is called "a reality precisely in the advanced countries of the West, most of all America:" Old habits die hard...

...JOHN RODDEN is a member of the department of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville...

...Will the all-too-familiar hard-line calls for the jackboot on the human face prevail...

...The appearance of Animal Farm and 1984 represents a new epoch for the Soviet Union as well as for Orwell's reputation in the Communist world...

...A VERY PARTIAL RECLAMATION PROJECT THE CASE OF COMRADE ORWELL JOHN RODDEN Last May 13 the Literary Gazette, the organ of the Soviet Writers' Union, published a full-page extract from the most influential political novel of the twentieth century, George Orwell's 1984...

...Since May, Orwell is no longer being excoriated in the Soviet press as a "troubadour of the Cold War...

...One result is a good deal of strenuously acrobatic doub-lethinking...

...What form will it take...

...Equally encouraging was the publication in late September of several chapters of Orwell's Animal Farm in three different Soviet organs, among them Nedelya, the literary supplement to the official government newspaper, Izvestia...

...The Rodnik editors conclude that Orwell's "grotesque animal paradise" is "multifaceted,'' possesses special (though unspecified)' 'contemporary relevance," and is "by no means open to a simple [i.e., single] interpretation...

...But how thoroughgoing will Soviet self-criticism be...

...The case of "Comrade Orwell" is significant precisely because it is a locus where the anxious jumble of hopes, fears, and tensions pressing upon Soviet attempts to confront the past converge and convolute...

...He and other supporters of rapid cultural liberalization have calculated that they can resuscitate unpersons and fill in memory holes as needed to build public trust and improve ,the performance of the Soviet system...

...Opening the books on the Soviet past, then, is not just a matter of dumping "stagnant prohibitions...

...But in all events, what we are witnessing at present is not a cultural revolution, but a very partial reclamation project...

...But the time has passed when the book,...to put it delicately, embarrasses us...

...No amount of duckspeaking can evade the dilemma: the party's claims to legitimacy rest upon its continuity with the past, which the party speakwriters have rewritten and re-rewritten since Lenin and Stalin...