Glyn Ford on totalitarianism
George Orwell and Russia by Masha Karp published by Bloomsbury
Orwell was an anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist from the mid-thirties until his death in 1950. What drove his anti-Stalinism deep was his experiences fighting in Spain with the militia of Britain’s Independent Labour Party’s (ILP) sister party the Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista (POUM) and the consequent civil war within the civil war when in May 1937 during the Barcelona days the Communists suppressed the POUM. They outlawed the organisation, and arrested, tortured and murdered its leadership claiming the Party was in league with Franco. POUM’s offence was to argue that winning the war was consequent on first winning the revolution. Incompatibility with Soviet foreign policy meant Stalinism became a counter-revolutionary force.
The seeds of Orwell’s antipathy were already planted. When he set off on his January 1936 pilgrimage to Northern England – captured in The Road to Wigan Pier – many of his guides were members of the Independent Socialist Party (ISP) that had split from the ILP in 1934 over the entrist activities of the Revolutionary Policy Committee conspiring to drag the ILP into the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB) close orbit. Orwell’s loathing was further dressed by more Moscow trials and the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.
As Masha Karp details, Orwell saw little to choose between Nazi totalitarianism and its Soviet variant. True the USSR was the lesser of the evils, but both had to be fought. Yet after November 1942, when the tide of war turned decisively in the Allies favour, the totalitarian threat to Britain and Europe was no longer from Berlin and Moscow, but Moscow alone. Orwell saw his task from 1937 on to save socialism by destroying the Soviet myth. He had three strikes; Homage to Catalonia (1938), Animal Farm (1945) and closed with 1984 (1949). The barrier to understanding was Britain’s besotted intellectuals, the CPGB’s apparatchiks and their fellow travellers. He abhorred the gramophone mind no matter the tune it played and saw in the likes of Kingsley Martin, the editor of New Statesman, and Victor Gollancz, his erstwhile publisher – both of whom had refused to publish his Spanish horrors – as dogs sufficiently well-trained to jump without the whip.
In 1941 he applied the POUM’s analysis to Britain in his unsung manifesto The Lion and the Unicorn. In this runt of the Orwell canon he argued the war was unwinnable with the current people in charge. “It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free …… Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time or place.” He wasn’t to know that Tokyo’s miscalculations at Pearl Harbour was to deliver America’s capitalist cavalry as respite to Britain’s need for fundamental change. George Orwell and Russia covers his post-war escape from this “neither Washington nor Moscow” dilemma. The place to make democratic socialism work at the necessary collectivist scale was to be in a United Socialist States of Europe as he posited in “Towards European Unity” (Partisan Review, 1947) calling it “the only worthwhile political objective today”.
Karp breaks new ground in detailing how Orwell’s legacy was betrayed and subverted by false friends. His anti-Stalinism was hijacked to serve as proxy for an all-encompassing attack on socialism. Of Animal Farm’s Ukrainian and Russian translations, the first was flawed and the second fraudulent. Orwell had determined that neither should be brought out by any reactionary “white” publisher and was prepared to provide financial assistance to guarantee that. He was twice betrayed. The Ukrainian edition in 1947 was published by Prometheus, after promises that it was an association of ex-members of the Bolshevik party representative of the opposition inside Soviet Russia. This was an overly generous description at best, especially when they arbitrarily decided to cut sentences from Orwell’s preface deemed unsuitable for “Western Ukrainians”.
The 1949 Russian version was far worse. Here, despite assurances from the British Foreign Office that the people running the Russian publisher Possev in Germany were known to them and reliable, they turned out to be “whites”, many of whom had collaborated with the Nazis and in some cases fought in the Russian Liberation Army under Nazi command. They then proceeded to bowdlerise the text stripping out all references to the raven Moses – who represented the collaboration of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Soviet authorities – to shape the narrative to fit their political predilections. It was a case of praise the Lord and pass the ammunition to Orwell’s detractors on the left.
George Orwell and Russia is exceptional in adding new depth to Orwell’s story. My only carp is the author’s failure to resist in the end hawking his spectre around her favourite political hobby-horses and concluding that the two of them were as one mind. Orwell was far too nuanced a thinker to be so easily pigeon-holed.