Since the USSR dissolved 30 years ago, its officially directed at no one. Even beyond that, parallels between 1984 and the Drug War were prominent well before then. And in the modern moment, there are plenty of parallels - up to and including the book being banned in US schools and libraries.

What? It’s no longer directed at the USSR because they stopped existing? I guess all the other anti-USSR propaganda just stopped being that as well? Is “Maus” directed at nobody because Nazi Germany collapsed 78 years ago?

It is neither the only "communism bad" book nor exclusively referenced in that capacity.

Good thing that’s not what I said then. It is the #1 “communism bad” book. It’s almost become a synonym for “communism” in the west. No other anti communist book can compete. It runs completely counter to reality to deny this.

It is happening in Ukraine right now.

Which part of Ukraine is a direct, non-proxy war?

The book takes place in England.

It’s almost as if a book can have commentary on things beyond the geographical limits of its setting. You’re in denial if you refuse to acknowledge the obvious slighting of communism as an “eastern” ideology:

Eurasia is, of course, the Soviet Union, which Orwell assumes will have absorbed the whole European continent. Eurasia, therefore, includes all of Europe, plus Siberia, and its population is 95 per cent European by any standard. Nevertheless, Orwell describes the Eurasians as 'solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces'. Since Orwell still lives in a time when 'European' and 'Asiatic' are equivalent to ' 'hero' and 'villain', it is impossible to inveigh against the Soviet Union with the proper emotion if it is not thought of as 'Asiatic'.

You increasingly cannot. Large public central repositories of historical records are being shut down via lawsuit while private vendors are paywalling and purging their own backlogs. Algorithmic manipulation has made certain images and records more difficult to find over time. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, some viral content revisiting Bin Laden's history was loudly criticized by national media as "praise for Bin Laden on TikTok". This concern trolling further polluted the information stream and resulted in another round of flagging and purging of information related to Bin Laden on the grounds of it being "radicalizing" and "disinformation".

This is quite different from 1984. I don’t recall the part where the government publicly and loudly acknowledges the history they want to erase to attack it as disinformation. It’s just gone. The goal of revisionism might be the same but the tactic is different. Killing the Bin Laden letter is just standard censorship of antigovernment texts. It is quite different from completely altering history to “we had always been at war with Bin Laden”. There are pro-regime people who justify previously being allied with Bin Laden. Real-life revisionism is about emphasis as well as injecting counterfactual interpretations of historical events into the mainstream. Coverups obviously happen, but they were never public in the first place. If anything, 1984 implies that censorship requires top-down organization when all it really needs is for capitalists to have a financial stake in engaging in it. Quite idealistic. Capitalist privatization and destruction of historical records are a feature of capitalism. Capitalists would kill their own children if they could cut their losses by an extra dollar in doing so. There is a more scientific way to approach this.

Nobody reading the novel today has a USSR to reference as an analog. We barely even teach the Cold War in history classes before college. This, again, goes back to the methodical purging and occluding of the historical record. In a perverse way, 1984's accusations and stereotypes are but a few of the reference points anyone interested in the old USSR history can easily obtain.

Please find me a single literature class in the entire country where discussion of the book doesn’t immediately pivot to the USSR and how the book is about it. And your last sentence contradicts your “directed at no one” claim from earlier. The USSR doesn’t need to exist for anti-USSR propaganda to work. It attacks the communist project at large through the USSR. You are kidding yourself if you think any high school literature class isn’t talking about how 1984 depicts communism. Almost everyone except a few western socialists treat it as a book about the USSR because that’s what it is. The USSR collapsing does not retroactively undo the purpose of the book. It is a piece of Cold War propaganda and it is taught as if it accurately depicted the Soviet reality and “dream”.

This is in line with watching “Birth of a Nation” as a somehow antiracist film because the Confederacy didn’t exist anymore.