When we read George Orwell’s two masterpieces Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, we wonder why the author turned against socialism. Orwell never repudiated socialism- until the day he died he believed in social democracy, socialism that is kept in power by the electoral will of the people. What Orwell was opposed to was Stalinism, the prevalent belief in 1930’s and 1940’s leftist thinking that affirmed that Stalin was doing right with his totalitarian regime. Many socialists believed Stalin was right to murder or imprison all of his enemies, real and perceived.
Orwell’s voluntary military service to the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War was what sparked his antipathy to Stalinism. Orwell wrote of the carnage and chaos of that civil war in his book Homage to Catalonia. In less than three years (July 1936- March 1939), the Spanish Civil War cost one million lives. It was a prelude to World War II, in which at least seventy million people died over the course of six years.
George joined the Republican army in Spain late in 1936. He was recruited by the Comintern, an acronym for the “Communist International”, a supposedly representative organization of powerful socialists. Joseph Stalin despised them, but he wasn’t above using them for his own global machinations.
In Spain, the army of Republican volunteers, many of whom were socialists, were opposed by Spanish fascists who represented General Franco. Two providential occurrences happened to George while he was stationed in Spain. First, through an act of fate, Orwell joined up with a battalion of socialists who were considered Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky had fought admirably in the Russian Civil War, and was the heir apparent to the highest post in the Soviet Union when Lenin died of a stroke in 1924. However, Stalin usurped the premiership, and Trotsky was forced to flee for his life to Mexico, or be murdered.Thereafter, anyone associated with Trotsky was considered suspect by those who followed Joseph Stalin. The Stalinists wanted to control the entire Republican army.
Wounded and Marked for Death: Orwell’s Narrow Escape from Spain
The second act of fate was that Orwell was wounded. While serving at the front, George was hit in the neck by a sniper’s bullet. The bullet missed his jugular vein, carotid artery, and spinal cord, but nicked his voice box. George expected to die- he had never heard of anyone surviving a neck wound as serious as this. But he lived to tell his side of the story. While Orwell recuperated, his wife Eileen joined him in Spain. Eileen told Orwell that he must flee Spain immediately. The Stalinists were arresting and murdering anyone who had served with a Trotskyite unit. For this atrocity, the Stalinists implemented one of Stalin’s most worn maxims, “It is easier to kill an enemy than to persuade him.” George and Eileen escaped to England, and from then until his death, Orwell was opposed to Stalin and his government.
The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with victory for the fascist military government, thanks to the help of the Germans and the Italians. Five months later, flushed with victory in Spain and filled with confidence, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began.
Telling the Truth About Stalin—When No One Else Would
Orwell began writing Animal Farm in 1943. The book was published in 1945, just before the end of World War II. While George told the truth about Stalin’s mass murders, the Free World lauded Joseph Stalin for standing up to Hitler. Many people in the West excused Stalin’s use of phony kangaroo trials to eliminate his enemies. Stalin’s henchmen tortured these enemies for their confessions, and then immediately shot them or sent them to one of Stalin’s notorious prison camps known as gulags, where they died of starvation, cold, or overwork. Many of the falsely accused men had supported Stalin’s rise to power.
Orwell could never condone such tactics, and his writing became heroic. He never backed down from what he perceived about the Russian premier. He stood up to Stalin and told the truth about his regime when Stalin was at the height of world popularity. Orwell justly ridiculed Joseph Stalin and described his methods of leadership: murder, murder, and more murder, followed by lies, lies, and more lies. Orwell’s last book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published in 1949. George died of tuberculosis the following year. He was only forty-six. Stalin’s Soviet regime outlived Orwell, but not his works. Having ruled Russia for twenty-nine terror-filled years, Joseph Stalin died in 1953 at the age of seventy-four. The Soviet Union lasted just about as long, but it, too, collapsed in 1991.