In her new book, veteran BBC Russian service journalist Masha Karp carefully documents and analyzes the place of Russia in the evolution of George Orwell’s political philosophy. It is a valuable addition to the voluminous literature on Orwell, which includes a recent revised edition of the authoritative biography by D.J. Taylor.Footnote ¹ This important book will appeal to students of literature, political philosophy, and Soviet history. Soviet Russia was central to Orwell’s vision and legacy. Animal Farm (1944) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) were modeled on the Soviet experience and were a damning indictment of the Soviet project. Orwell’s outrage at the depredations of imperialism and capitalism, which he witnessed first-hand and documented in his early novels and essays, was joined in the late 1930s by his realization that Stalinism was just as dangerous as fascism.

Orwell believed that totalitarianism could take root anywhere, which is one reason why Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were set in Britain. But his concern with totalitarianism as a universal threat may have led Orwell away from considering the specific and unique features of Soviet communism. It was not purely by chance that the first totalitarian regime was born in the former Russian empire. And the threat of Bolshevism was in turn a powerful instigation for Italian fascism and German National Socialism. Karp focuses on politics, and we do not learn about Orwell’s views on Russian culture, and whether he thought Russia’s historical trajectory made Stalinism inevitable. In a 1945 letter Orwell wrote “I don’t think I could be described as a Russophobe. I am against all dictatorships.”Footnote ²

George Orwell (1903–50) is arguably the most politically influential English writer of the twentieth century. With authoritarianism currently resurgent in Russia, China, and beyond, his work remains all too relevant for the twenty-first century.Footnote ³ But the Russia of 2024 is very different from the Russia of 1944. How relevant, then, are Orwell’s seminal texts for understanding contemporary Russia? Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, political repression in Russia has reached a level not seen since the Stalin era, with over 20,000 people arrested for voicing opposition to the war. And yet, at the same time Russians enjoy much more personal freedom than in the Stalin era: they can be seen reading Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Moscow metro, the internet is mostly uncensored and accessible through VPNs, and Russians are free to move in and out of the country.

Orwell remains a controversial and contested figure. Was he uncovering timeless truths about the challenges to human freedom in the modern age? Or was he a mere tool of western propaganda in the Cold War? Are Orwell’s warnings of the threat of totalitarianism still relevant, or should he be seen as a historical figure, a product of the unique mid-twentieth century struggle between fascism, communism, and liberalism?

There is also the question of how totalitarianism relates to empire. Orwell was the product of the British Empire at the height of its powers, the son of an Indian colonial official who himself served as a police officer in Burma from 1922–27. Orwell came to see empire as headed for the dustbin of history, while totalitarianism was a real and looming threat. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine looks much like a war of imperial conquest, while Russia in turn accuses the US of projecting imperial power, an argument that resonates in the Global South.

Karp explains that Orwell was initially exposed to Soviet socialism in the 1920s through Esperantist acquaintances (Ch. 1), then in the 1930s he read the works of critical observers such as Austrian sociologist Franz Borkenau (Ch. 2). The first book on Russia that he reviewed was Assignment in Utopia (1938) by Eugene Lyons, who had spent six years in the Soviet Union as a journalist (100). Orwell himself never visited Russia, but he did encounter agents of the Soviet state as a volunteer fighting for the Republicans in Spain. As a member of the anarchist POUM brigade, he narrowly escaped arrest by NKVD agents in 1937. That experience gave him the emotional jolt to fuel his brilliant fictional representations of life in a totalitarian regime (Ch. 3).

After Spain, Orwell read widely in an effort to understand the dynamics of Stalinism, and was frustrated by the Left’s unwillingness to acknowledge that Stalinism was a betrayal of socialism (Ch. 4). I was stunned to learn that in 1938 Orwell supported Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich (Karp, 110). Orwell reasoned that if France and Britain went to war with Germany they would lose and/or be fatally weakened, and then Iosif Stalin would step in and take over all Europe. Orwell saw Stalin as a greater long-term threat than Hitler, not least because Stalin had many supporters inside the western democracies, which was not the case for Hitler. Biographer Bernard Crick argues that the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 meant that Orwell “changed overnight,” abandoning pacifism for revolutionary patriotism.Footnote ⁴ Orwell did not seem particularly interested in Hitler’s antisemitism. He visited a former concentration camp in November 1945, but did not write much about the Holocaust.Footnote ⁵ Anshell Pfeffer argues that “Orwell never fully grew out of his ill feelings toward Jews.”Footnote ⁶ He was also deeply misogynistic and patriarchal, as evidenced by his treatment of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.Footnote ⁷

In Ch. 5 Karp documents Orwell’s experiences during World War II, when the alliance with Stalin meant that all criticism of the Soviet Union had to be suppressed. Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1944 but was unable to get it published until August 17, 1945 (Karp, 131). There are haunting parallels between the final scene of Animal Farm, where the pigs sit down with the men, and photos of the 1943 Tehran conference, where Stalin sat alongside Roosevelt and Churchill. Orwell started drafting notes for what became Nineteen Eighty-Four in September 1943, with a provisional title The Last Man of Europe (Karp, 141). After the war, Orwell threw himself into efforts to expose the “Soviet menace,” which Karp details in Ch. 6. This culminated with Orwell sending in 1949 to the government’s Information Research Department a list of thirty-eight people who he considered to be “fellow travelers” and “crypto-communists” who should be barred from their public broadcasts and publications (Karp, 178). It included people like Stephen Spender, Charlie Chaplin, and Paul Robeson. The existence of the list, part of a longer roster of 135 names that Orwell had drawn up, only became public knowledge in 1996. For much of the Left, this confirmed Orwell as a “traitor to socialism” (Karp, 203); a McCarthyite foe who sacrificed free speech to the geopolitical needs of the Cold War.

During the Cold War, Orwell was largely appropriated by the Right and used as a warning against the evils of socialism and communism. The CIA funded film adaptations of both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm in the 1950s.Footnote ⁸ The message of Animal Farm is quite blunt: revolutions end badly; while Nineteen Eighty-Four spelt out the dangers of collectivism in gruesome detail. However, Karp explains in Ch. 7 that Orwell was a man of the left who retained hope in a democratic socialist future throughout his life. He published a critical review of Road to Serfdom (1944), in which Friedrich Hayek argued that all socialism led to National Socialism or communism (Karp, 191). In 1949 Orwell issued a public statement to make clear that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not an attack on the socialist policies of the post-war Labour government (202). Although Orwell politically saw himself as a socialist, in terms of cultural values he was conservative. When asked who he would have supported in the English Civil War, Orwell said he preferred the Royalists to the Roundheads, because the latter were “such dreary people.”Footnote ⁹

In 1944 Orwell was still talking about Soviet communism as “the lesser evil” compared to Nazism (Karp, 196). Karp argues that Orwell was more understanding of Soviet communism than Nazism, since “in order to survive [Russian communists] were forced to abandon, at any rate temporarily, some of the dreams with which they had started out” (Karp, 198). In 1947, Orwell speculated that even in the Soviet Union the pendulum of history may swing back towards freedom, and “In that case there may by 1960 be millions of young Russians who are bored by dictatorship and loyalty parades, eager for more freedom, and friendly in their attitude towards the West” (Karp, 195).

In Ch. 8 Karp discusses the impact of Orwell’s work inside the Soviet Union, and in the émigré communities that had his books translated and smuggled through the Iron Curtain. Orwell remained optimistic that it was worth trying to reach beyond the Russian leaders to mobilize the Russian people and help them win freedom. In 1949 he subsidized the publication in Russian of Animal Farm by the émigré publisher Possev: he was unaware that they censored the text to remove anti-religious references to the Raven character, Moses (Karp, 213). There was a challenge in how to translate “farm” into Russian or Ukrainian: should it be kolkhoz, kolgosp, khutor, skotnyi dvor, or ferma? The Communist Party Central Committee published a translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four for restricted elite circulation in 1959 (Karp, 222). Soviet censors tied themselves in knots: if they published condemnations of the work they would only draw attention to it and its arguments. In the 1980s—as 1984 approached—they started to pretend he had really been critiquing the west, not the USSR.Footnote ¹⁰ This is still the line of Russian propagandists today, such as the foreign ministry’s Maria Zakharova.

Ch. 9 compares Soviet life with the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. With fascism again on the march, understanding Orwell’s legacy has renewed urgency, as Karp explains in Ch. 10. After the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989–91, there was a sense that Orwell’s work was a product of the Cold War, of only historical interest. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its campaign of disinformation in the west have led to a surge of interest in Nineteen Eighty-Four.Footnote ¹¹ His depiction of a society riven by war fever and leader worship seems eerily prescient of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where citizens can be jailed for five years for calling it a “war” and not a “special military operation.” Leonid Bershidsky, who completed a new translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2019, writes that “Reading ‘1984’ closely … is both sickening and cathartic because so much is instantly recognizable.”Footnote ¹²

There is a lively debate over the intellectual origins of Orwell’s powerful dystopian vision. It can be seen as part of a vibrant tradition of critiques of industrial capitalism, such as H.G. Wells’ When The Sleeper Awakes (1899), Jack London’s Iron Heel (1908) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It was not until late 1945 that Orwell read Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (originally published in 1924), writing a review in January 1946 (Karp, 138). But Orwell’s debt to Zamyatin was probably greater than he was willing to acknowledge.

Animal Farm is a strikingly original format for a political critique, very different in style from Orwell’s previous works (fiction and non-fiction). Of course it has precursors in allegories from Aesop’s Fables through the Persian twelfth century Conference of the Birds, and as a ten year-old Orwell would have read Beatrice Potter’s Tale of Pigling Bland (1913).) Anna Funder persuasively argues that Orwell got the idea for Animal Farm from his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who had studied at Oxford under J.R. Tolkien.Footnote ¹³ (Orwell himself never went to college.) Eileen also typed and edited the manuscript. In his preface to the 1947 Ukrainian edition, Orwell said he drew inspiration from an incident when he saw a child whipping a recalcitrant horse. Such a scene features in Crime in Punishment, which Fedor Dostoevskii in turn borrowed from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.Footnote ¹⁴ Dostoevsky is also the source of the “2+2=5” equation in Nineteen eighty-four (in Notes from Underground).

There is a debate over whether Orwell was or was not familiar with Bunt (Revolt), the final work of Polish author Władysław Reymont, published in 1922.Footnote ¹⁵ Reymont (1867–1925) was a Catholic nationalist and admirer of traditional peasant society whose works included Ziemia Obiecana (The Promised Land) (1898) and Chłopi (The Peasants) (five volumes 1904–9). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1924. Bunt was a response to the depredations of the Bolshevik revolution. The dog Rex leads a bloody revolution and guides the animals far to the east, to a more just world, where he in turn is overthrown and the animals chose a gorilla to rule over them. A new translation by Charles S. Kraszewski has now been published as The Revolt of the Animals. The book is difficult to read, dense with violence and lacking nuance and empathy. Filip Mazurczak argues that the naturalistic style of The Revolt “is more reminiscent of Watership Down and White Fang than of Animal Farm.”Footnote ¹⁶ In Orwell’s lifetime, it was published in Dutch and German.

Other possible precursors include Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–85), who wrote a short story “Skotskoi bunt” (The Animals’ Revolt) in 1880, published in 1917.Footnote ¹⁷ More possible antecedents keep surfacing, such as the 1914 story La reunión de ayer (Yesterday’s meeting) by Bolivian Adela Zamudio (1854–1928), about an animals’ revolt.Footnote ¹⁸

Whatever the antecedents of Orwell’s allegorical and dystopian works, they retain their ability to engage contemporary readers, and remain central to debates about the scope and conditions for human freedom.