Saved from friend and foe

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

ORWELL'S VICTORY by Christopher Hitchens Allen Lane, Penguin, f9.99, pp. 150, ISBN 071399584X SPAIN BETRAYED: THE SOVIET UNION IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck and Grigory Sevostiano% Yale, f27.50, pp. 537, ISBN 0300089813 Only one possible subject existed 'for a good novel on the Spanish war by a writer with Malraux's previous political awareness', the American art critic Clement Greenberg told a friend in 1939,

the Barcelona uprising of May 1937. We've come to a place where politics must enter any conceivable apercu, and Barcelona sums up the whole political content of the war.

In the event, Malraux did write a novel about Spain, as did Hemingway, but neither took up the subject that so excited Greenberg. That was left to George Orwell, not in a novel but in a personal memoir. Homage to Catalonia was notoriously both reviled and a complete failure at the time. It made Orwell an anathematised and hated figure for the Communists and their penumbral galere, who treated him and his book either with poisonous abuse or with what used to be known in Vienna as the Totschweigtaktik, death by silence. By the time Orwell died in 1950 the book hadn't even sold out its first edition of 1,500 copies, and it only gradually acquired its reputation as one of the 20th century's central political and moral texts.

As Christopher Hitchens says in Orwell's Victory. many English writers engaged in public controversy of one sort or another during the 1930s and 1940s, but in almost all cases the political statements made by these men would not bear reprinting today'. Everything Orwell wrote does, though even now not everyone has come to terms with what he wrote about Spain, or what Greenberg had meant about 'the whole political content of the war'. Partly that's a sentimental hangover. For the generation of the 1930s, the Spanish war was 'the emotional experience of their lifetime', in A. J. P Taylor's words, and there are still those for whom, as E. J. Hobsbawm has said, the war remains 'the only political cause which. even in retrospect, appears as pure and compelling as it did in 1936'. But emotional experiences are often misleading. and a more detached observer might say of the war what Algernon says of the truth, that it was rarely pure and never simple.

To begin with, Spain is different. Auden's 'arid square, nipped off from hot Africa' is in some ways barely European; not for nothing are the Spanish the only people apart from the English who speak of the rest of Europe as 'the Continent'. And its political culture was unique. The characteristic Spanish movements of Right and Left. Carlism and Anarchism, had no parallel in any other country, and until the civil war the Spanish Communist party had been just one, rather unimportant, groupuscule on the Left. The war itself was not an epic contest between democracy and fascism (or indeed Christianity and godless Bolshevism, according to taste), it was a local conflict rooted in peculiarly Spanish conditions, and the passionate partisanship of the outside world was to some extent an exercise in projection, even for Orwell. Fighting for the Spanish Republic was nevertheless a matter of choice and conviction for him (and it distinguished him from many of his tub-thumping enemies on the Left), but it was more like chance that took him not, along with most foreign volunteers, into the International Brigades and the defence of Madrid hut into the militia of POUM, the revolutionary Marxist, ferociously anti-Soviet party led by Andres Nin in Catalonia.

This in turn allowed him, as well as serving bravely in the trenches on the Aragon front, to witness the events in Barcelona that spring when fighting broke out around the telephone exchange. The Communists represented this as the malign work of Trotsky-fascists' and other rotten elements, which justified suppressing them, a view still being purveyed by Raymond Williams as late as 1971. In a breathtakingly dishonest passage, he said not only that 'most historians' took the view that the revolution being fomented by POUM and the Anarchists was an irrelevant distraction, but that

some, at the time and after, have gone so far as to describe it as a deliberate sabotage of the war effort. Only a few have argued on the other side, that the suppression of the revolution by the main body of Republican forces was an act of power politics, related to Soviet policy.

'Most historians' existed in Williams's imagination; 'only a few', of course, includes Orwell: and just how veracious a witness he was — not to say how inapt the word 'pure' is — can be seen in gruesome detail in Spain Betrayed. This is another volume in the Yale 'Annals of Communism' series which draws on the Moscow archives at last made available with the collapse of Soviet Russia, and which has become one of the most important publishing projects of our time. One could perhaps have done without the polemical title, and one could certainly have done with more commentary to elucidate the raw documents. All the same, these reports sent to Moscow by Comintern agents in Spain speak rivetingly for themselves, excruciating jargon and all (what fun the author of 'Politics and the English Language' would have had with them).

Any military aid from Stalin to Spain had been sent on his own terms and for his own reasons, His intervention may have been intended in part as a sop to his nervous admirers in the West, alarmed by the Moscow Trials; or so Schulenberg, the Ger man ambassador in Moscow, thought at the time. And Gerald Howson has shown in his book Arms for Spain how Stalin, with cynicism startling even by his standards, used a currency-exchange scam to sell the arms at enormously more than they were worth and strip the Republic of its gold reserves. But the deeper purpose of Russian intervention was to enable Stalin's 'advisers' in Spain to infiltrate police, army, ministries, and then to fracture and ultimately destroy other parties in the Popular Front so as to take control of the government. In Spain, that is, Stalin and his servants practised the very 'salami tactics' — chorizo tactics? — used a decade later to take control in east Europe.

These documents amply confirm that the Communists devoted more energy to destroying their supposed allies than to fighting Franco. One of the most senior apparatchiks in Spain was Anatoly Nikonov, deputy head of Soviet military intelligence, who told Moscow in February 1937 that it was impossible to win the war 'if these scum within the republican camp are not liquidated'. POUM were 'the rottenest unit of the entire republican army', who needed to be destroyed, Palmiro Togliatti, later the widely admired leader of the Italian Communist party, likewise insisted that the Anarchists were 'scum' who would need to he dealt with by large-scale action'. And so they were: the correspondence proves beyond doubt who was responsible for the Barcelona events. Reporting to Marshal Voroshilov in Moscow on 15 April, Georgi Dimitrov, the head of the Comintern, said that the Communists in Catalonia had decided not to wait

'passively' for a 'natural' unleashing of the hidden government crisis, but to hasten it and, if neccessary, to provoke it.

Horrific as this violence and treachery were, even that wasn't the heart of the story. Orwell later wrote with controlled bitterness about the Italian militiaman he had met on his first day in Barcelona, who had almost certainly died subsequently. 'and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the GPU'. And yet he also acknowledged the complexities of the situation, and the mistakes his friends in Catalonia made, What really transformed his consciousness was something else. One former Communist used to say that the worst thing about communism hadn't been the brutality, it had been the lies. Orwell's harsh experiences at the front, culminating in a near-fatal wound, affected him less than the fantastic torrent of falsification, misrepresentation and plain mendacity which surrounded those Barcelona events. It was that which chilled him to the core, and gave him his great subject for the rest of his too short life: 'This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is dying out of the world.' Thanks to his Spanish experiences, he foresaw 'a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past': in other words, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, were both germinated in Barcelona in 1937.

The abuse he suffered for telling the truth continued after his death in 1950. And yet, almost as dismayingly, Orwell became the object of a posthumous cult of devotion, and of much intellectual graverobbing. In his little firecracker of a book, Hitchens attempts to rescue his hero and place him, as one might say in Kipling's words, where neither foes nor loving friends can hurt him. Like all true admirers, Hitchens dislikes the canonisation of Orwell as St George of England and the cloying veneration he has inspired, but he addresses his harshest words to the detractors. The questions he deals with aren't new, and while Hitchens must be admired for prolificity he also exemplifies economy of effort, eschewing the long, detailed work of scholarship (in this case, on the selfsame subject, John Rodden's admirable The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making of 'St George' Orwell) for a short Philippic, which is plainly as much about Christopher Hitchens as about George Orwell. That is especially so when he deals both in sorrow and anger with 'the sheer hatred of Orwell that is still to be found in some quarters'.

Some of what he writes is a little too glib. Orwell was consistently right about 'the three great subjects of the 20th century', Hitchens says, 'imperialism, fascism and Stalinism'. But to lump those three together is to make a category mistake. Socialism and fascism, communism and National Socialism are political creeds, tendencies or movements, which may properly be praised or blamed in those terms. 'Imperialism' is not a tendency or movement, it is an historical episode or a fact of life, with malign as well as benign consequences, and to praise it in itself as virtuous or to condemn it as vicious is meaningless. As for 'Stalinism', this is a term always to be on one's guard against. There's a useful verbal game to be played. Whenever you encounter that word, immediately repeat the sentence, substituting 'communism' for 'Stalinism'; and then again — since Stalin, after all, claimed to be, and was regarded by his followers as being, a great socialist ruler — substituting 'socialism'. The effect is most instructive, as well as enjoyable.

In a chapter on 'Orwell and the Right' Hitchens laments the body-snatching practised by neo-conservatives like Norman Podhoretz (who wrote an essay 20 years ago called 'If Orwell Were Alive Today', and answered his question, roughly speaking, 'Orwell Would Be Me'). He deals politely with the feminist critics, less so with post-modernists and in particular with the simply grotesque personage of Claude Simon, whose award of the Nobel prize in 1985 was one of the most dismal moments in recent literary history, and whose 'novel' The Georgics is a lengthy and base slander of Orwell.

Writing about Orwell's Englishness, Hitchens is at once illuminating and at something of a loss. He has lived in America for more than 20 years, he never had much affinity for that kind of Englishry in the first place, and he is no longer quite pitch-perfect when dealing with his native country. Describing Orwell's brave defence of P. G. Wodehouse against the wartime campaign of abuse, Hitchens says that Wodehouse was 'pelted with calumny by every red-faced and roast-beef demagogue in the scepter'd isle', which is journalistic bluster, and wrong anyway: Wodehouse's chief calumniator was a Daily Mirror columnist, while his other brave defender was Evelyn Waugh, not quite the point Hitchens wants to make.

Of course the appropriation of Orwell as an English icon by such as John Major was absurd. Or perhaps one should say by his speech-writers: had our Unknown Prime Minister ever read the Orwell essay he misquoted as 'old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist'? What Orwell actually wrote in 'The Lion and the Unicorn' wasn't a limp invocation of Olde Albion but one of his most astute passages:

The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries in the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings — all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?

gone, but the bewildering contrasts and the muddle are still there, and the passage, mutatis mutandis, is just as valid now. Although Hitchens sees this, and just about recognises Orwell's combination of radical principle and conservative disposition, he has little temperamental affinity with it, or with the Orwell who was patron saint of the fogeyism of the Left (still found lurking in the Guardian, 'Radicals for cricket, railways and real ale'). We live at a time when it has been truly said that the Right has won politically but the Left has won culturally; Orwell would have preferred it the other way round.

But the longest, the most important and the best chapter in Hitchens's book returns to that hatred for Orwell on the political and cultural Left, where his very name 'is enough to evoke a shiver of revulsion'. As Hitchens eloquently shows, this hatred is hateful and the revulsion revolting. It's one thing to disagree with Orwell or to dislike him. It's another continually to traduce and misrepresent him, and Hitchens is coldly scornful about

the sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion that appear to ignite spontaneously when Orwell's name is mentioned in some quarters.

To illustrate this he provides a sottisier of ludicrous but also monstrous attacks on Orwell by E. P. Thompson, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Raymond Williams and Conor Cruise O'Brien, none of whom seems able, or willing, to read his plain meaning at all. First prize is shared by Said and Williams. Reviewing another book of Hitchens's here last spring (this is not meant to be an annual event), I suggested that he was too gentle with Williams, and it is gratifying that he now writes much more sternly about that 'overrated' figure:

Orwell will be reread and appreciated — I was about to say 'long after Williams has been forgotten' but I forbid myself the cliche and prefer to say — whether Williams is read and remembered or not.

I myself would borrow instead a phrase from Byron, and say that Raymond Williams will be read when George Orwell is forgotten, but not until then.

In all of this there is a strong personal element. As is well known, Hitchens himself has recently undergone something of a Damascene — or should one say Barcelonan? — moment after 11 September when he turned with repugnance from his old comrades, not only insisting that American military action was necessary, which was arguable, but that the screeching of 'America had it coming' or 'the West must take the blame' on the Left was simply abject and contemptible, which was unarguable. Maybe this was a moment waiting to happen. For years past cynics have been predicting that Christopher Hitchens would follow the usual Left-to-Right path taken by Kingsley Amis or Paul Johnson or indeed his own brother Peter Hitchens. This hasn't so far come to pass, and I rather hope it doesn't — one in the family seems quite enough — but he has certainly gone through a critical development, and now says that he no longer calls himself a socialist (although he still misses it 'like an amputated limb', poor bunny. A stiff drink often helps to ease the pain in such cases.) In any case, Hitchens can speak for himself, but I suspect that what he has really discovered is not that the Right is right and the Left is wrong so much as 'all the folly of a fight! With a common wrong or right.'

And yet the process is not yet quite complete. In an otherwise excellent recent article on another subject Ferdinand Mount digressed to say that 'Nothing surprised me more than the vicious attacks on Isaiah Berlin both before and after his death,' and he named Hitchens as one of the attack dogs. Nothing surprised me less than the savagery of the attacks on Berlin — or on Camus, or Silone, or Koestler, or Orwell. This is a wholly predictable if remarkably devious rearguard action, by which it will be conceded that there was such a thing as 'Stalinism', which wasn't an altogether pretty business, but that this must in no way whatever be held to reflect adversely on Marxism or Bolshevism — or on anyone who supported Stalin during his long reign. Hence the vitriol directed at those radicals and liberals who either recovered quickly from 'Russian flu', or worse, like Orwell, never succumbed to it in the first place. He said some very shocking things, but none more so than what he wrote in his diary in 1940:

Such horrors as the Russian purges never surprised me, because I had always felt that — not exactly that, but something like that — was implicit in Bolshevik rule.

Many on the Left will never forgive him for that recognition of the truth.

There is a final answer to that torrent of lies, and to that chorus of defamation; and a truly wondrous contrast. All the evidence makes it clear that the Communists not only wanted to crush the independent Left in Catalonia but planned show trials there on the Moscow pattern. It's entirely possible that if they had got their hands on Orwell he would have been one of the victims; as it was, Nin was arrested and tortured to death without providing the appropriate 'confession'. But then came an extraordinary whirligig of time's revenges, historical irony married to poetic justice. Beginning with Vladimir AntonovOveseenko, Soviet advisers in Spain were recalled to Russia and themselves purged (as Orwell noted, you have to see the funny side of this), and in the years after 1945 the same fate awaited others who had served the Comintern in Spain, like the Hungarian Laszlo Rajk and the Czech Artur London. With their help, their countries were taken over by the means which the Communists had honed so skilfully in Spain; and then the old guard was 'liquidated'.

All of this was witnessed by a younger generation in eastern Europe, who understood it not least because of Orwell. The most glorious compliment he was ever paid is in The Captive Mind, the great little book published in 1953 by Czeslaw Milosz after he had left for the West. He describes how he and other Party functionaries in Poland had been bowled over by Nineteen Eightyfour:

Because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well ... Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.

In other words, as Hitchens says, only a couple of years after Orwell's death,

his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.

Has any other writer ever known such posthumous vindication?

And as if Milosz weren't enough, there are all those others who have saluted Orwell with a reverence born of intimate awareness: Vaclav Havel, Rudolf Bahro, Miklos Haraszti, Leszek Kolakowski, Milan Simecka and Adam Michnik, the men who lived under 'actually existing socialism' and survived to bear their own witness. What a roll of honour to set beside Orwell's dismal detractors! And how much it justifies Hitchens's title! The lies and libels Orwell's enemies poured over him were all useless, when the truth prevailed in the end. Yes, it was a famous victory. They lost. He won.