SOVIETS WILL PUBLISH '1984' - The Washington Post

MOSCOW, MAY 12 -- Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was the model for the dark totalitarian

society George Orwell portrayed in his novel "1984." This week Mikhail

Gorbachev's Soviet Union published parts of the novel and will soon

print it entire.

The book had been banned in this country since its publication 40

years ago. Customs officials confiscated it from tourists. Librarians

and storekeepers had instructions to keep it off their shelves. As the

introduction to the excerpt printed in this week's Literaturnaya Gazeta

pointed out, there was even an official import ban on "1984."

The monthly journal Novy Mir, which recently printed Boris

Pasternak's long-suppressed novel "Dr. Zhivago," will print the Orwell

novel in full. The excerpt in Literaturnaya Gazeta, published by the

Soviet Writers' Union, is called "The Ministry of Truth."

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"It is so eerie to pick up an official Soviet publication and read

phrases like 'the Ministry of Truth' or 'Big Brother is watching' and

realize that the Soviet Union is trying, slowly, perhaps, to criticize

such things along with Orwell," said one Moscow intellectual who had

read the book in an underground edition.

The excerpt in Literaturnaya Gazeta described the propaganda work of

the novel's main character, Winston Smith, who holds a job in the

"Ministry of Truth," rewriting history and helping to develop slogans

like "War Is Peace," "Freedom Is Slavery" and "Ignorance Is Strength."

The short introduction accompanying the excerpt conceded, if

somewhat obliquely, that the Soviet Union itself had been a model for

Orwell's book.

"It is bitter, very bitter, that some pages of the novel could,

without special effort, be put down to our account," the introduction

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said. "But is Orwell alone to blame for that?"

"1984," which remains a searing satire of the psychological control

and personal despair in totalitarian regimes, is one of many novels,

censored for years, that have been published under Gorbachev's campaign

to both enrich and woo the intelligentsia. Vasily Grossman's "Life and

Fate," Anatoly Rybakov's "Children of the Arbat" and Andrei Platonov's

"Chevengur" have also been returned to Soviet readers.

One of the most important political novels to be published recently

was Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel "We." Zamyatin, who started as a supporter

of the Communist revolution in 1917, began to see the authoritarian

direction the Soviet Union had taken and wrote "We" as a kind of

warning of what life here could become -- lifeless, controlled, barren.

Literary critics here and in the West consider "We" to be a

forerunner of Orwell's novel.

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