''The history exam can be canceled,'' Izvestia wrote, ''but no one has a right to cancel history itself, no matter how painful. It continues, and everyone now living must take part in its creation. Today, we are reaping the bitter fruit of our own moral compromises and are paying for those things that we mutely accepted and supported and now do not know how to explain to our children.''

Orwell could hardly have put it better, if he had been optimistic enough to imagine in fiction such a dramatic reversal of the totalitarian corruption of history.

One by one, also, the disgraced individuals of the Stalin years are being rehabilitated. In February it was Nikolai Bukharin. Last week it was Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Grigory Pyatakov. All four were victims of the purge trials in the 1930's, those parodies of justice in which the innocent accused confessed their guilt.

Kamenev and Zinoviev were particularly important figures. They confessed to trying to murder Stalin on the orders of Trotsky, and to playing a part in the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party chief. The Kirov murder - now suspected of being Stalin's work - was used by Stalin as the excuse for massive purges and killings.

The restoration of history is taking place not only in politics but in literature. Poems and novels long banned are appearing in a flood.