Orwell also would be shocked by how quickly party-line communists sought to erase the memory of Stalin’s treaty with Hitler, with no mention of it in official Russian histories. Instead, they began demanding that the United States and England open a “Second Front Now” to relieve German pressure on the Soviet Union. This ideological control of basic facts, of putting events in a kind of “memory hole,” as he would call it, would become a major theme when he wrote 1984 seven years later.
