10

ROBERT CONQUEST

Orwell, Socialism and the Cold War

I
As an observer (and satirist) of realities, Orwell was – reliable. Yet that is too
weak a word (though he changed his views on some points, and in any case
never posed as an ex cathedra pundit). A man of the Left, our champion in
the Cold War, he, better than most of his contemporaries, could take in the
phenomena, the actualities.
But theory, or abstraction, was – as Clive James has pointed out – not his
forte. What he saw of the injustices of colonial rule was, at a more second-
hand level, attributed to imperialist exploitation and the source of compar-
ative Western prosperity – refuted as James points out, by the existence of
Sweden, but anyhow untenable on various grounds.
More central to Orwell’s work was his view that the poverty and distress
he saw in England was attributable to capitalism, and would be cured by
the socialist state. So he was indeed a keen advocate of Socialism – though
definable (as he put it) as justice and liberty.
But at the same time he had little use for some socialists. His reason was
that the idea of justice and liberty had been ‘buried beneath layer after layer
of doctrinaire priggishness, party squabbles and half-baked “progressivism”
until it is like a diamond hidden under a mountain of dung’.1
Even worse, ‘The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply
a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not
because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but
because it is untidy . . .’2
Again, Orwell comments that this sort of socialist sought

a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’,
the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the
book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion.
Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is per-
fectly capable of displaying hatred – a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo

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 Orwell, Socialism and the Cold War

hatred – against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denounc-
ing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash
himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption,
he himself invariably belongs’.3

He added that,

‘And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from the middle class, and from
a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that’.4

And again that

‘there is the horrible jargon that nearly all Socialists think it necessary to
employ. . . . When an ordinary person hears phrases like ‘bourgeois ideology’
and ‘proletarian solidarity’ and ‘expropriators’ he is not inspired by them, he
is merely disgusted. Even the single word ‘Comrade’ has done its dirty little bit
towards discrediting the Socialist movement. How many a waverer has halted
on the brink, gone perhaps to some public meeting and watched self-conscious
Socialists dutifully addressing one another as ‘Comrade,’ and then slid away,
disillusioned, into the nearest four-ale bar!’5

Orwell in fact seems to have wanted socialism on condition that it would

not be run by socialists. (We might suggest, if it comes to that, that many cit-
izens, after Enron, would favour capitalism so long as not run by capitalists.
Or bureaucracy not run by bureaucrats).
Now, of course, it must be said that no one was as unlike the socialists
Orwell had run into than Atlee, Bevin and Morrison. Indeed he – if not uncrit-
ically – supported the Labour governments. And the quasi-intelligentsia
which he so reviled had fairly little input into their regime.

II
It will be clear, again, that – like Engels! – Orwell was strongly against what
he called cranks, though not so much cranks as activist militant cranks.
I will quote briefly from his dramatic description of what he took to be
two typical elderly specimens seen on a bus in Letchworth:

‘They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which
their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple.
Their appearance created a mild-stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next
to me, a commercial traveler I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back
again at me, and murmured, ‘Socialists. . . .’ He was probably right – the I.L.P.
were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him,
as an ordinary man, a crank meant as Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank’.6

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 ro b e rt c o n q u e s t

But to confine ourselves to the generalities of socialism, or of one variety of

socialist, would be a simplification. When Orwell saw immediate realities, he
had no blockage against them – as with his description of pre-Second World
War Liverpool, with the Conservative city council ‘ruthless’ towards private
home ownership and in effect putting through the ‘socialist legislation’ of
‘rehousing from public funds’. Thus, he says ‘Beyond a certain point therefore
Socialism and capitalism are not easy to distinguish’, and in support he
notes a fine quarter the other side of the river, built by the Leverhulme soap
works.7
He thus saw, empirically, (and – as so often with Orwell – against his
preconceived generalisations), a tendency: and one whose positive side con-
flicted with what he came to see (partly under James Burnham’s influence) as
the possible future development of an anti-popular merger into corporatism,
to which it may be said, we are notably vulnerable today.8
And if he sometimes saw the emerging, or impending, post-capitalist soci-
ety as at least probably and potentially benign and socialist in the best
sense, he retained his commonsense attitude even to fine-sounding and well-
meaning projected Utopias.
Here he is (in his essay on Swift):

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only

arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the
tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than
any system of law. When human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt not’, the
individual can ‘practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are suppos-
edly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under continuous pressure to make
him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else’.9

III
Apart from their implicit appeal to reality and commonsense we find Orwell,
in his essays on literature, and other themes, seeking humanity and clarity.
His output in those fields is hard to categorise. The word ‘critic’ doesn’t
seem quite right. ‘Humaniser’ or ‘clarificator’ perhaps. And if he has a non-
literary point, he does not disguise it. Kipling, for example, is understandably
rebuked for his imperialism – but more for the odd outbursts of gutter chau-
vinism than for the imperialism as such, which, indeed, Orwell notes to
be concerned, unlike his critics, with real problems. Anthony Powell wrote
that what was often missing in writing on Kipling was his extraordinary
‘originality’, a claim traditionally confined to a different category of writers,

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 Orwell, Socialism and the Cold War

but one which Orwell could see. And in a more political context Orwell’s
open-mindedness can be seen in his remarks about Churchill, a political
enemy – that though the British people rejected his policies, they ‘liked’ him,
and one had to admire in him ‘a certain largeness and geniality’.10

IV
On Stalinism, though, the really extraordinary thing was not that Orwell was
essentially right but that so many Westerners were so spectacularly wrong.
Of course there were other voices of sanity – Koestler (though not exactly a
Western intellectual), Humphrey Slater, the senior British officer in Repub-
lican Spain and editor of Polemic. (The British CP had a special meeting
devoted to how to handle the problem of Orwell, Koestler and Polemic.)
Orwell’s main concern was the gullibility of the intelligentsia. How could
so many educated minds believe all that fantasy and falsification? The head
of the Austrian CP, Ernst Fischer, tells of his later wife asking him how he
could have believed that all the leading Old Bolsheviks were Nazi agents.
Wasn’t it more likely that the lone survivor had faked all that? Fischer found
that he couldn’t answer.
Orwell’s worldwide fame rests of course mainly in this context on his two
works of what I suppose should be called political science fiction, Animal
Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
We are often told that Russians and East Europeans could not believe that
Orwell had not lived in the Soviet Union. I read Animal Farm soon after
its publication, and I made a minor contribution to its effect. In Sofia in
1946 or 1947, when I was Press Attaché at the British Legation, I got to
know Georgi Andreichin. He had been imprisoned in the USA soon after
the First World War, had gone to Moscow a Communist devotee – his name
is mentioned in the Kaganovich correspondence recently published by Yale.
He was attached to Averell Harriman in the late 1920s when the latter was
in Moscow on some commercial project. When Harriman was back in 1941
for the US government he asked after Andreichin. He was by now in a labour
camp and it took some time to find him. But he was released, and later joined
his friend, the Comintern veteran Vasil Kolarov who, returning to become
President of Bulgaria, took Andreichin with him as a chief aide, with the
rank of cabinet minister.
He had heard of, and I lent him, Animal Farm – which enthralled him.
He told me that in his long revolutionary career, all he had been able to
accomplish was to nominate his native village as the rural-show place for
foreigners – thus giving them a prosperity denied to the rest of the peasantry.

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 ro b e rt c o n q u e s t

An Orwellian perspective, I agreed. After I left Bulgaria he seems to have

disappeared in the Stalinist purge of the local Communist leaders and others –
Orwell, alas, again.
It is occasionally denied that Nineteen Eighty-Four targeted the Soviet
Union. Bernard Williams, editing Orwell, complained about the tendency.
But others spoke, even speak, of it as a general satire on tyranny everywhere.
In fact the Stalin regime is identifiable in great specificity. The Unperson
was a common Moscow unphenomenon. The ‘Spies’ are based on the heroic
denouncers of parents in the USSR, where the ‘sacred and dear’ Pavlik
Morozov museum rose in the site where this young Stalinist hero had
‘unmasked his father’ – a recalcitrant peasant who had been shot.
As to Facecrime, an authoritative instruction issued in Moscow runs:

One must not content oneself with merely paying attention to what is being
said for that may well be in complete harmony with the Party programme.
One must pay attention also to the manner – to the sincerity, for example,
with which a school-mistress recites a poem the authorities regard as doubtful,
or the pleasure revealed by a critic who goes into detail about a play he professes
to condemn.11

The sudden switch of international alliances in the middle of a party ora-

tor’s speech is modeled on the circumstances of the Nazi-Soviet pact, when
some editions of Communist newspapers on the same day accused the Ger-
mans of war-mongering in the afternoon, and celebrated them as friends in
the evening.
Doublethink is virtually a translation of the Russian ‘dvoeverye’. Of
dozens of examples which might be given, the most obvious is Soviet elec-
tions. Vybor (election) in Russian as in English means ‘choice’. The ballot
forms contained elaborate instructions on crossing out all but one name. But
there never was more than one name . . . or again, ‘concentration camp’ was
changed in Stalin’s time, as the camps got more deadly, to ‘corrective labour
camp’: ‘joycamp’ takes the process further still.
As to the origins of the party, Orwell tells us that lngsoc (like communism)
‘grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology’;
and, while rejecting all that Orwell understands by socialism, ‘chooses to do
it in the name of Socialism’.12
Walter Cronkite, in his preface to Nineteen Eighty-Four (1983), suggests
(quite contrary to the novel’s economic lessons) that ‘greater efficiency, ease
and security may come at a substantial price in freedom’, whereas, of course,
Orwell saw that totalitarianism destroys efficiency, ease and security together
with liberty, and because of the destruction of liberty.

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 Orwell, Socialism and the Cold War

When Orwell wrote, his main concern, as he makes clear time and again,
was less to attack the Stalin regime as such than to combat a whole herd
of intellectual quislings at home; to expose the delusions of intellectuals. He
remarks, in his 1947 Introduction to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm,
‘I would not have condemned Stalin, and his associates merely for their
barbaric and undemocratic methods . . . But on the other hand it was of
the utmost importance that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet
regime for what it really was’, his aim being ‘the destruction of the Soviet
myth’ in Western minds.13
When it comes to the future, Orwell predicts the eventual collapse of the
Soviet regime. He was strong not only on the lethal falsifications of Stalinism,
but also on a phenomenon to be found, and partly out of Sovietophilia,
in the British intelligentsia – anti-Americanism, seen not only as political
foolishness, but as yet another example of a mulish conditioned reflex. ‘To
be anti-American nowadays is to shout with the mob. Of course it is only
a minor mob, but it is a vocal one . . . But politico-literary intellectuals
are not usually frightened of mass opinion. What they are frightened of
is the prevailing opinion within their own group. At any given moment
there is always an orthodoxy, a parrot-cry which must be repeated, and in
the more active section of the Left the orthodoxy of the moment is anti-
Americanism’.14
Only the intelligentsia could be wrong in the ways Orwell indicts – and this
was at a time when universities processed those who had already received a
reasonable education. The present decline of the universities has exacerbated
a problem that Orwell was also much concerned with – the projection of
unreal verbalisations and complexities. Long since validated on communism,
Orwell needs to be vigorously promoted in his capacity as a supreme critic,
not only politically, of the misuse of language. Some of his targets – J. B.
Bernal (the Communist physicist), for example, were consciously lying; they
knew what they were doing. Orwell writes of the crypto-Communist M. P.
Konni Zilliacus that he was not honest, but he was sincere (though later
denounced as a British spy in a Stalinist show trial). Orwell’s emphasis was
not against them so much as their actions against clarity and reality. He often
complained not merely of conscious or unconscious obfuscation, but also of
the mere abuse met with in those circles where, as he put it, words like ‘red
baiter’ and ‘rabid’, were used instead of argument, so that ‘if from time to
time you express a mild distaste for slave-labour camps or one-candidate
elections, you are either insane or actuated by the worst motives’.15
Orwell would not have stooped to ‘yank-baiters’. Still, he rated 1776 et seq
higher than 1917/1984.

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 ro b e rt c o n q u e s t

NOTES
1. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin
Books Ltd. 1974, p. 248.
2. Ibid, p. 211.
3. Ibid, p. 212.
4. Ibid, p. 214.
5. Ibid, p. 255.
6. Ibid, p. 206.
7. Ibid, p. 189.
8. Orwell, George, ‘Burnham’s View of the Contemporary World Struggle’, New
Leader (New York), 29 March 1947 (in Collected Essays, Vol. 4, pp. 313–26).
9. Orwell, George, ‘Politics vs Literature – an Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’,
Polemic, No. 5, September 1946, in Collected Essays, Vol. 4, pp. 215–16.
10. Orwell, George, ‘Review: Their Finest Hour, by Winston S. Churchill’, New
Leader (New York), 14 May 1949, in Collected Essays, Vol. 4, p. 494.
11. Oktyabr, No. 2, 1949.
12. Orwell, George, 1984, Chapter 1 of ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism’, passim.
13. Orwell, George, Collected Essays, Vol. 3, pp. 404–405.
14. Orwell, George, ‘In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus’, Collected Essays, Vol. 4,
pp. 397–98.
15. Ibid, p. 399.

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