A Spectator's Notebook
MORE AND MORE I am driven to the conclusion that the Com- munist regimes regard Orwell's novels not as satires but as useful handbooks of suggestions. Last year, for the first time, a Communist leader' (Vice-Premier Luca, in Rumania) was actually accused not merely of general treachery but, in true Snowball fashion, of having commanded a machine-gun platoon on the White side in the Hungarian Civil War, in which he had previously figured as a revolutionary hero. But the most remarkable imitations are of the Ministry of Truth. Last year, it will be rememberp4, all :•,•rabscribers to the Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to remove the pages containing the article on Beria and replace them with new ones, taking up the same space, but devoted to photographs of the Bering Sea and the biography of an eighteenth-century Russo- Holstein courtier named Bergholtz. Now a new impression of the Soviet Encyclopaedic Dictionary has come out. The only noticeable change is the article on Malenkov. In con- formity with his reduction not to unperson but to half-person. it has merely been cut by half and had his favourable adjec- tives cut down to size and his war record omitted. (The only increase, in length is that he is now described as the son of a 'small employee' instead of the earlier 'employee?) The space is filled in by brand-new items—on the Malakhov Fortress, Malengr (a sort of wine), Maleshevska Mountain, and Mala- khovsky, a Russian railway engineer responsible for the con- struction not only of 1-3-1 but also of 0-4-0 locomotives. The editors' skill in finding suitable names to fit the recast pages would have appealed to Winston Smith's professional pride. I wonder if they are already digging out little articles on `Molloy, Irish tenor,' or even, in view of signs of a possible Malenkov come-back, Whurja, Indian town,' or 'Bulldozer, Russian invention'?
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