Who Controls The Past Controls The

This is the Party slogan of the totalitarian state in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), introduced in Part I, Chapter 3. It is the operating principle of Oceania's Ministry of Truth, where the protagonist Winston Smith works falsifying historical records. Orwell based the concept on Stalinist propaganda techniques he had studied closely: the Soviet state routinely revised official history to make the present leadership appear inevitable and the past discreditable, erasing inconvenient facts from public memory.