The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

by Carl Sagan

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the “Big Brother” state employs an army of bureaucrats whose only job is to alter the records of the past so they conform to the interests of those currently in power. 1984 was not just an engaging political fantasy; it was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union, where the rewriting of history was institutionalized. Soon after Stalin took power, pictures of his rival Leon Trotsky—a monumental figure in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions—began to disappear. Heroic and wholly anhistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten stories high, in museums, on postage stamps.