The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  What he found was “a bad copy of 1914–18, a positional war of trenches, artillery, raids, snipers, mud, barbed wire, lice and stagnation.” He spent most of the next four months with the POUM’s 29th Division in the trenches of the Aragón front, which divided the Republican-held town of Alcubierre from the fascist strongholds of Saragossa and Huesca. Orwell’s major concerns were, in descending order, “firewood, food, tobacco, candles and”—a distant last—“the enemy.” Starved of Russian arms and equipment, the POUM militias were incapable of mounting an assault on the fascists. Among other things, they lacked uniforms, helmets, bayonets, binoculars, maps, torches and modern weaponry. Orwell’s own rifle was a Mauser dating back to 1896. He was infuriated by a sense of paralysis and futility and damned the front with the same verdict he passed on the dreary inertia of the Comstock family in Keep the Aspidistra Flying: “Nothing ever happened.” Georges Kopp, the maverick Belgian commander of Orwell’s battalion, told his men, “This is not a war. It is a comic opera with an occasional death.” Yet Orwell found in the trenches a superior version of the cleansing egalitarianism that he had found among the tramps, and it made him a socialist at last. He “breathed the air of equality.” It was this localised experience that enabled him to say later, despite everything, that he had left Spain with “not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.”

  Another, less spiritual consolation was the supply of chocolate, cigars and Fortnum & Mason tea that Orwell began receiving from his wife Eileen after she followed him to Spain in February to work as McNair’s secretary in Barcelona. The couple had married eight months earlier, having met at a party in 1935, and in many respects they were an excellent match. Both were emotionally reticent, with a tendency towards gloom enlivened by an ironic sense of humour and a spirit of generosity. They shared a passion for nature and literature, frugal tastes, and a carelessness about their health and appearance, rarely seen without a cigarette dangling from their lips. Both had strong principles and the courage to act on them. The difference was ambition. Eileen was a highly intelligent Oxford graduate, universally well-liked, but she subordinated her own aspirations to Orwell’s, dropping out of a master’s degree programme in educational psychology to live with him in a cottage-cum-shop in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington. One friend said, “She caught George’s dreams from him like measles.”

  Orwell finally saw action in April, when the militia advanced towards the fascist trenches. He displayed genuine mettle by braving enemy fire while shouting, “Come on, you bastards!,” to which one fellow volunteer responded, “For Christ’s sake, Eric, get down!” During the long weeks of stalemate, however, his eccentric side emerged. This is a man who refused to shoot a retreating fascist because the man was struggling to hold up his trousers after a toilet visit and was therefore “visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him,” yet was so alarmed by a rat that he blasted it with his rifle, thus alerting the enemy and triggering a fierce firefight which ended up destroying the militia’s cookhouse and two of their buses. “If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness,” he wrote, a dozen years before the rodents broke Winston Smith’s spirit. Rats are mentioned in all but one of Orwell’s nine books.

  For all the camaraderie, Orwell had not yet come to love the POUM. This was partly due to his contrarianism: “The political side of the war bored me and I naturally reacted against the viewpoint of which I heard most.” But he also thought the communists were making more of a difference. His romantic affection for the underdog was overtaken by his pragmatic desire to get things done. Even years later, he believed that the POUM’s insistence that a successful revolution would have led to victory was misguided.

  Due a few days’ leave with Eileen in Barcelona in late April, Orwell therefore planned to quit the militia and join the International Brigades in Madrid, where the action was. His fellow militiamen told him he was a fool and that the communists would kill him, but Orwell was adamant. Only later did he realise how fortunate he was to be allowed to challenge the party line without being denounced or threatened. He had no idea how dangerous Barcelona had become for people like him. He was about to find out.

  Shortly before Orwell returned to Barcelona, Richard Rees passed through town on his way to Madrid to serve as an ambulance driver for the Republican army. When Rees met Eileen at the POUM office, he initially interpreted her dazed, distracted manner as concern for her husband, until he realised what was really unsettling her: “She was the first person in whom I had witnessed the effects of living under a political terror.”

  Franz Borkenau had revisited Barcelona in January and found a city already very different from the one he had left in September. Whereas previously he had been able to travel Republican Spain unmolested, now all doubts and criticisms were taboo. “It is an atmosphere of suspicion and denunciation,” he wrote, “whose unpleasantness it is difficult to convey to those who have not lived through it.” The POUM, “liked by nobody,” had been designated “Trotskyists,” a label that Stalin’s show trials had transformed into a death sentence. The fact that Trotsky had disowned them, Borkenau noted, was irrelevant: “A Trotskyist, in communist vocabulary, is synonymous with a man who deserves to be killed.” In February, Yan Berzin, Russia’s chief military adviser to the Republic, sent a report to Moscow about the POUM. “It goes without saying,” he wrote, “that it is impossible to win the war against the rebels if these scum within the republican camp are not liquidated.”

  Orwell sensed immediately “an unmistakable and horrible feeling of political rivalry and hatred” in the city. The revolutionary solidarity had evaporated, with food queues for some and black market–fuelled nightclubs and restaurants for others. Everyone he spoke to thought that violence was inevitable. In the lobby of the Hotel Continental one morning, Orwell introduced himself to the celebrated American novelist John Dos Passos, who had come to Spain to make a propaganda documentary with Ernest Hemingway and was now searching for news of his missing translator José Robles. Dos Passos noticed that Barcelona had “a furtive, gutted look, stores shuttered, people glancing over their shoulders as they walked.” Drinking vermouth in wicker chairs, the two men compared notes on the importation of Stalinism to Spain. Dos Passos was relieved, at last, “to be talking to an honest man.” They were not easy to find.

  “The match that fired an already existing bomb,” in Orwell’s words, was lit on May 3, when the city’s Assault Guards, under communist orders, stormed the anarchist-controlled Telephone Exchange and set off five days and nights of street fighting that came to be known as the May Days. Orwell spent three of them stationed in the rooftop observatory of the Poliorama cinema with a rifle to help defend the POUM headquarters across the road. From his eyrie, he could see that the communists controlled the streets to the east of the Ramblas and the anarchists the west. Rival flags fluttered from the hotels, cafés and offices that had been transfigured, overnight, into armed strongholds.

  Only the Hotel Continental at the head of the Ramblas was considered neutral ground, so it became a surreal community of fighters, reporters, foreign agents and some stranded French lorry drivers, all seeking food and shelter. It was there that Orwell spotted the fat Russian known only as “Charlie Chan.” This alleged agent for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, told anyone who would listen that the violence was an anarchist putsch designed to undermine the Republic and aid Franco. “It was the first time I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies,” Orwell wrote, “unless one counts journalists.”1

  After the violence subsided, leaving hundreds dead, those lies were plastered to the walls in the form of posters reading “Tear the mask.” They depicted a mask, bearing the hammer-and-sickle, being wrenched away to reveal a snarling, swastika-tattooed maniac: allegedly the true face of the POUM. In Burmese Days the innocent Dr. Veraswami is turned into a Trotsky (or an early version of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s arch-heret
ic Emmanuel Goldstein) by the corrupt magistrate U Po Kyin: “To hear what was said about him, anyone would have imagined the doctor a compound of Machiavelli, Sweeney Todd and the Marquis de Sade.” This was now the fate of the “Trotskyist-fascists” of the POUM. Their Radio Verdad used the pointed slogan “The only broadcasting service that uses reality in preference to make-believe.” But make-believe was winning.

  Orwell was not surprised that the tension between the factions had boiled over into armed combat. What he did not foresee, and could not forgive, was the subsequent deceit. The communists claimed to have exposed a vast network of traitors communicating with the fascists via secret radio stations and invisible ink, and plotting to assassinate Republican leaders—lies so outrageous that people assumed they had to be true because nobody would dare fabricate them. Franco, who benefitted from the idea that the Republic was riddled with his spies, endorsed the claim. A Special Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason was established. Newspapers were censored. Thousands of anarchists and union members were arrested. The streets writhed with fear and distrust.

  To Orwell’s dismay, foreign communist newspapers such as Britain’s Daily Worker were in accord with Charlie Chan. “One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right,” he wrote, making an honourable exception for The Manchester Guardian. It would take a book to set the record straight, and he wrote to Gollancz to tell him so: “I hope I shall get the chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies.” It was even worse in Franco territory, where the press claimed that Republican militias were raping nuns, feeding prisoners to zoo animals, and letting stacks of corpses rot in gutters. One American journalist observed that the scale of deceit in Salamanca, the nationalist capital, was “almost a mental disease.” For Stephen Spender, whose idealism evaporated so fast that he left the Communist Party after a matter of weeks, the war triggered a fundamental revelation about human nature: “This was simply that nearly all human beings have an extremely intermittent grasp on reality. Only a few things, which illustrate their own interests and ideas, are real to them; other things, which are in fact equally real, appear to them as abstractions.” He did not exempt himself. “I gradually acquired a certain horror of the way in which my own mind worked.”

  After the shock of the May Days there was no way that Orwell could abandon the POUM, so he went straight back to the Aragón front. He didn’t last long. Orwell was so much taller than the average Spaniard that his head protruded over the trench’s parapet. Every morning he liked to stand up to enjoy his first cigarette of the day. When an American militiaman, Harry Milton, asked him one day if he was worried about snipers, Orwell shrugged it off: “They couldn’t hit a bull in a passage.” At dawn on May 20, one marksman proved him wrong, with a well-aimed bullet that hit him in the throat beneath his larynx. Orwell assumed he was dying. Another millimetre and he would have been, but the bullet missed the carotid artery and only temporarily paralysed the nerve controlling one of his vocal cords.2 Lying in the trench, blood pouring from his throat, Orwell’s first thought was for Eileen; his second “a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well . . . The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it!”

  Orwell was hospitalised for the next three weeks. Clearly, his war was over, but he needed to get his discharge papers signed by a doctor on the front line. By the time he returned to Barcelona on June 20, the hammer had come down. As soon as he walked into the Hotel Continental, Eileen took him by the arm and whispered, “Get out.” The May Days crisis had led to the removal of Prime Minister Largo Caballero, and thus the last roadblock to a complete crackdown on the POUM. The party was now illegal, as any militiaman coming back from the front soon discovered. Orwell’s battalion commander Georges Kopp was arrested. Young ILP member Bob Smillie (“the best of the bunch,” said Orwell) died in jail in the Republican capital Valencia. James McNair and Stafford Cottman of the ILP were in hiding. Andrés Nin was missing, and his fate would soon become another lie. He was brutally tortured by Russian NKVD agents (“his face was no more than a formless mass,” a report found), then killed, but some German members of the International Brigades dressed up as Gestapo agents and staged a “rescue,” so that the communists could claim that Nin was still alive and residing with his true masters in Salamanca or Berlin, much as Snowball in Animal Farm is rumoured to be with Mr. Frederick of Pinchfield Farm.

  Barcelona during the crackdown was Orwell’s first and only taste of the “nightmare atmosphere” that would envelop Nineteen Eighty-Four. In that poisonous broth of rumours, smears and paranoia, “however little you were actually conspiring, the atmosphere forced you to feel like a conspirator.” Even when nothing bad was happening, the threat of something happening tore at the nerves. Orwell and Eileen’s hotel room was raided and a warrant was issued for their arrest. Reports by NKVD agents and their Spanish counterparts, discovered in the 1980s, falsely described the couple as “pronounced Trotskyists,” conspiring with dissidents in Moscow.

  After three fearful days and nights, which Orwell spent wandering the streets as unobtrusively as possible and sleeping rough, he, Eileen, McNair and Cottman managed to obtain their travel documents from the British consulate and catch the morning train to France and freedom. “It was a queer business,” Orwell wrote to his friend Rayner Heppenstall. “We started off being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels. Eileen was wonderful, in fact actually seemed to enjoy it.” Fenner Brockway, travelling the other way to try to secure the release of imprisoned ILP members, met Orwell at Perpignan, just over the French border. “It was about the only time I saw him really angry,” Brockway recalled.

  Orwell had been driven to Spain by his hatred of fascism, but he left six months later with a second enemy. The fascists had behaved just as appallingly as he had expected they would, but the ruthlessness and dishonesty of the communists had shocked him. According to Jack Branthwaite, an ILP comrade, “He said he used to take what people said about the communists as capitalist propaganda, but he said, ‘You know, Jack, it’s true.’ ”

  “Almost every journalist assigned to Spain,” wrote the American reporter Frank Hanighen, “became a different man sometime or other after he crossed the Pyrenees.” Orwell certainly did. At various points, he found his time in Spain thrilling, boring, inspiring, terrifying, and, ultimately, clarifying. “The Spanish War and other events in 1936–7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood,” he wrote a decade later, just prior to starting work on Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”

  Orwell’s final act of naivety was to believe that his old colleagues would publish his conclusions. Instead, Gollancz turned down his book and Kingsley Martin, editor of The New Statesman & Society, rejected not just his essay about the war but a review of Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit in which he attempted to smuggle the gist of that essay. When Orwell did finally get the chance to tell his story, in Philip Mairet’s New English Weekly, it was under the pointed title “Spilling the Spanish Beans.” “There has been a quite deliberate conspiracy . . . to prevent the Spanish situation from being understood,” he wrote. “People who ought to know better have lent themselves to the deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist propaganda.”

  It was not so much the crime that enraged him—war breeds lies as surely as it produces lice and corpses—as the cover-up. In Orwell’s vocabulary, swindle, racket and humbug were the dirtiest words. The realpolitik of Gollancz and Martin struck him as a dire precedent. Suppressing the truth for short-term gain is like declaring a state of emergency: a temporary suspension of f
reedom too easily becomes permanent. Reporting the messy reality of the war within a war was a test, and Britain’s pro-communist left failed it by loyally recycling totalitarian propaganda. He had expected better.

  For Orwell, the truth mattered even, or perhaps especially, when it was inconvenient. In his earlier non-fiction, he had finessed anecdotes and omitted awkward facts for literary purposes, but Homage to Catalonia was written with a new commitment to accuracy as a moral virtue. Without a consensus reality, he argued, “there can be no argument; the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached.” Orwell was clear-eyed enough to know that one can’t always get to the objective truth but that if one doesn’t at least accept that such a thing exists, then all bets are off. “I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written,” he wrote years later. “Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist.” This is what he meant by “History stopped,” a phrase that recurs in Nineteen Eighty-Four. When the only arbiter of reality was power, the victor could ensure that the lie became, to all intents and purposes, the truth.

  Well, up to a point. The deceit of the Ingsoc regime in Nineteen Eighty-Four appears impregnable. In reality, however, lies tend to backfire sooner or later. Borkenau noticed that communists in Spain who began lying to fool others often ended up deceiving themselves. Paranoia bred blame-shifting, purges and plunging morale, while the exaggerations of communist propaganda led to military errors. In Russia, the liars soon became the lied about. Most of the leading Russian officials in Spain were executed or sent to the gulag. Berzin, the military adviser who had recommended “liquidating” the POUM, was accused of espionage and shot in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.