From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   ‘George Orwell and Russia’ Review: The Origin of ‘War Is Peace’   
   By Alexandra Popoff, June 23, 2023, WSJ   
      
   Some books need no subtitle, and “George Orwell and Russia” is one of   
   them. Orwell leapt to everyone’s mind when, on Feb. 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin   
   launched his brutal war on Ukraine, on a scale not seen since World War II,   
   while denying it was war.    
   There we were, back in Soviet-era absurdity, dealing with the kind of   
   preposterous propaganda captured in Big Brother’s slogan “War Is Peace.”   
   Totalitarianism had reclaimed Russia, providing fresh urgency to Orwell’s   
   warning about the menace of    
   the totalitarian state—its craving for war, its suppression of truth, and   
   its tendency to return if not resisted.   
      
   Orwell, born in 1903 as Eric Blair, had “a rare mind that fused the   
   political and the artistic into one whole,” writes Masha Karp, a former   
   senior editor at the BBC Russian Service and a translator of English   
   literature into Russian. Her book, a    
   study not only of “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” but also   
   Orwell’s lesser-known writings on Soviet Russia, traces how his   
   antitotalitarian views evolved and how they relate to our time.   
      
   Orwell’s political opinions were inconsistent, which irritated the British   
   left: Despite his socialist leanings, he rejected the Soviet model. Unlike   
   most early 20th-century Western intellectuals, Orwell perceived a dictatorship   
   behind the socialist    
   facade, remarking in 1940 that “all people who are morally sound have known   
   [for a decade] that the Russian regime stinks.” An egalitarian, he dreamed   
   of a “democratic socialism” that never existed and passionately renounced   
   capitalism and the    
   free-market economy, proclaiming, in his 1944 review of Friedrich Hayek’s   
   “Road to Serfdom,” that for the masses “ ‘free’ competition”   
   entails “a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of   
   the State.” In “The    
   Road to Wigan Pier” (1937), his first real attempt to merge politics and   
   art, Orwell empathized with British industrial workers but also disputed,   
   according to Ms. Karp, “almost everything that was taken for granted by   
   socialists at that time.”   
      
   The Spanish Civil War crystallized Orwell’s political thinking. When in   
   December 1936 he arrived in Barcelona to help the Republican cause, he had no   
   grasp of the complexities on the ground. There was no single democratic front   
   resisting fascism. The U.   
   S.S.R. was the only reliable supplier of arms to the Republican government,   
   which allowed Stalin to intervene in Spanish politics. Orwell witnessed the   
   destruction of the anti-Stalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification   
   (POUM, from its Spanish name)   
   , whose members were accused of Trotskyism. He never forgot the manhunts in   
   Spain orchestrated by the Soviet secret police (NKVD), his friends’   
   imprisonment and, in Ms. Karp’s words, “the ruthless, cynical and, what   
   struck him most, mendacious    
   nature of the Soviet-directed communists.” As a member of the Independent   
   Labour Party’s militia, linked with the POUM, Orwell narrowly escaped   
   arrest. These experiences would allow him to re-create the terror of an   
   individual facing a brutal police    
   regime.   
      
   Orwell fled Spain in summer 1937 while the NKVD was building a case against   
   him. (The “Report to the Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason,   
   Valencia” concluded that “Eric Blair and his wife... are confirmed   
   Trotskyists.”) Eileen Blair worked as    
   a secretary at the POUM’s headquarters in Barcelona. When, on orders from   
   the NKVD, her hotel room was searched, Orwell’s papers, including notes made   
   during the Civil War, were confiscated. They were never found: Only a list of   
   seized items remains    
   in Moscow’s archive.   
      
   Orwell was aware that 1937 was also the height of Stalin’s Great Purge.   
   During his “decade-long thinking about totalitarianism” he read   
   extensively on the U.S.S.R. The first book he reviewed on Stalin’s Russia   
   was Eugene Lyons’s 1937 “   
   Assignment in Utopia.” As a Moscow correspondent for United Press   
   International, Lyons witnessed Stalin’s “monstrous state trials.” The   
   absurd 2 + 2 = 5 formula, reflecting the Soviet slogan “The Five-Year Plan   
   in Four Years,” later traveled    
   from Lyons’s book to “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” In his article “What Is   
   Socialism?” Orwell mentioned “Assignment in Utopia” alongside Arthur   
   Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” which gave him psychological insight into   
   Stalin’s purges, and    
   André Gide’s “Return From the U.S.S.R.,” with its indelible picture of   
   Soviet conformism.   
      
   Orwell was incensed by Soviet apologists, accusing them of being the   
   “publicity agents” of the U.S.S.R. in Britain. As he wrote in the essay   
   “Inside the Whale,” they “can swallow totalitarianism because they have   
   no experience of anything    
   except liberalism.” When during World War II the U.S.S.R. became a British   
   ally, the press avoided mentioning the Soviet-Nazi alliance, exhibiting, in   
   Orwell’s words, a “complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual   
   decency.”   
      
   “Animal Farm,” Orwell’s satire on Stalin and his reign of terror, had to   
   await publication until after the war. Fredric Warburg, the anticommunist   
   London publisher who issued the book in 1945, later admitted that his wife   
   felt it was their duty to    
   support the Soviets and “threatened to divorce him” for printing it.   
      
   While Orwell’s two major works of fiction have universal appeal, his source   
   of material was Stalin’s Russia. Before “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen   
   Eighty-Four” were officially published in Russia—under Gorbachev, in   
   1988—they were smuggled    
   across the border and circulated illegally. In the 1970s Ms. Karp, born in   
   1956 in Leningrad, was one of their readers. Oceania, she writes, did not   
   strike her as a dystopia; rather she read “Nineteen Eighty-Four” with a   
   feeling “of recognition. . .   
    . The details were right too. It was ‘about us.’ ”   
      
      
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