Found and Lost

There are some issues concerning George Orwell that never fail to excite public interest. One of them is Orwell’s time in Spain, and specifically, the issue of Orwell’s papers, which might still be held somewhere in the Russian Archives, as they had been seized from his wife Eileen’s hotel room in Barcelona during the NKVD search on 17 or 18 June 1937. Each time that the veil of mystery over this secret seems to be slightly raised, hearts beat faster and Orwell’s admirers hope for a sensation.

This is how the paper ‘“V” is for Valencia: International Brigades’ Counter-Intelligence Service Reports about Eileen and Eric Blair in Spain, 1937’ by Gleb Zilberstein, Svetlana Zilberstein and Pier Giorgio Righetti was presented in George Orwell Studies Volume 6, Number 1 (2021) – promising a sensational discovery.

Unfortunately, the discovery has not happened. There are several reasons for that. One of them is that it was nearly seven years ago, in 2015, that the Russian Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) put on-line a big part of what used to be called ‘Comintern Archive’¹ which, in particular, contains documents of the Spanish Civil War, some of them mentioning the names of Eric and Eileen Blair. Therefore it looks bizarre when the authors of ‘”V” for Valencia’ publish over twenty barely readable photocopies from the archive and claim that they had ‘found’ them, while nearly all of them are freely available online at http://sovdoc.rusarchives.ru/docs/ (for example, http://sovdoc.rusarchives.ru/sections/organizations/cards/95156).

The RGASPI Archives are not very user-friendly, especially for non-Russian speakers, but still accessible² and certainly their documents are more legible on screen than when they are minimized to fit a page. It should be said, though, that this free access is only available for the papers, which the Russian authorities decided to open to the public. What else is in the possession of RGASPI or other Russian Archives, i.e. if they still keep Orwell’s diaries, notes, letters and photographs, we simply do not know and won’t know for the foreseeable future. However, everything that is published by Gleb Zilberstein and his colleagues comes from the open sections, so it should not have been very difficult to ‘find’ the documents, which they present as newly discovered.

Moreover, since 1991, when the archives in Russia started opening, a lot of documents have come to the West and Orwell scholars have been aware of them. Some of the papers had been quoted before – as long ago as in 1998 in James Hopkins’s book Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press) and as recently as in 2020 in Giles Tremlett’s The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (London: Bloomsbury). But here we encounter another reason for the failure of Gleb Zilberstein, Svetlana Zilberstein and Pier Giorgio Righetti to make a genuine discovery – they are completely unaware of Orwell studies.

If they were, they would have immediately recognized one of the documents that they present as one of their ‘finds’ on page 54 in GOS under the title ‘Protocol of Search in Blair’s Room in Continental Hotel’. This is, in fact, ‘Report to Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason’ published (in the original Spanish and in English translation) on page 30-31 of Volume XI, Complete Works of George Orwell, in 20 volumes, edited by Peter Davison, (London: Secker& Warburg, 1998). Another document in the paper– printed on pages 49-50 and diligently back-translated from German into English on pages 50-52 – is actually well-known in its original form, that is, in English. It is Walter Tapsell’s report ‘On the English Section of the POUM’, which is kept in the Marx Memorial Library in London, Box C/13/7a and frequently quoted, notably in Gordon Bowker’s biography of George Orwell (London: Abacus, 2010), pages 216-217.

Walter (Wally) Tapsell (whose name is not mentioned in the GOS paper) was Harry Pollitt’s political emissary and prepared this report for his boss at the end of April 1937, when Orwell and his friends visited Barcelona on leave from the trenches. Tapsell obviously wrote in English, but the NKVD agents, who translated his report into German, were, unfortunately, not very accurate. In the English original Tapsell wrote:

‘In a conversation with the writer on 30^th Blair enquired whether his association with the POUM would be likely to prejudice his chances of enlisting with the International Brigade. He wishes to fight on the Madrid front and stated that in a few days he will formally apply to us for enlistment when his discharge from the POUM has been regularised.’

The agents translating the report into German naturally did not care who Blair was and in the middle of the paragraph devoted to Blair, mistakenly wrote ‘MacNair’ instead of ‘Blair’. One would think that the authors of the GOS piece, who are supposed to be particularly interested in Orwell, would be at least puzzled to see this sudden change of name. No, they obviously were not and their back translation runs: ‘In a conversation with a writer of this report, MacNair asked whether his connection with the POUM might preclude his inclusion in the International Brigades.’ Was it worth doing all the job of translating the text that already exists in English to distort the information about Orwell?

There are numerous mistakes in other parts of the paper too and this is not only slovenliness – this is an obvious lack of knowledge even of the basic facts of Orwell’s biography and lack of attention to them. Just a couple of examples, of which there are plenty, should suffice:

On page 47 it says that the search of Eileen Blair’s room was on 13 July 1937. But Orwell came back to Barcelona on 20 June, while the search had been held in his absence ‘a couple of nights earlier’ (Homage to Catalonia), that is, on 17-18 June. In any case, on 23 June, the Blairs had already escaped from Barcelona. The list of the confiscated materials (published, in the original French, on page 55 in GOS) is dated 10 July, most likely, this was the date when the document was prepared. 13 July, on the other hand, is the date that appears on the ‘Report to Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason’ – so this has been mixed up too.

The Conclusion on page 68 states that during the search Orwell’s letter to Moscow was found. Looking at the scan on page 55, anyone, who has a bit of French and can make out what the list of materials confiscated from Eileen’s room says, will read: ‘1 lettre de Moscou à Eric Blair’, that is, ‘1 letter from Moscow to Eric Blair’. It must have been Sergei Dinamov’s ‘earlier letter’, which Orwell mentioned in his reply to Dinamov’s second letter on 2 July 1937 (The Lost Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, London: Timewell Press, Ltd, 2006, 99-100).

And finally, the bit that Gleb Zilberstein, Svetlana Zilberstein and Pier Giorgio Righetti obviously take special pride in. The authors say they analyse

‘an English-German translation of David Wickes’s letter to Eileen. This translation has a handwritten note “Valencia” in the margin. After the graphological analysis, we conclude that this is the handwriting of Gustav Szinda, noting that this is a translation of a letter into German from “Fritz Valencia” or “Fritz V”.’ ( p 47)

The italicized part of the sentence presumably means that the letter was translated into German by Fritz V³. It is not very easy to understand, but on page 56 they write less ambiguously:

‘David Wickes’s letter to Eileen Blair was translated from English to German by counter-intelligence service officer, “Valencia” (Fritz)’. (p.56)

So they assert that Gustav Szinda wrote the name of the letter’s translator on top of the letter. Why would he do that? Why would this particular document have the name of its translator, while others do not? This is not explained.

It is much more likely, of course, that ‘Valencia’ here means the destination where the letter should be sent, especially as it is preceded by the German preposition “An”, which means “to”. One could suggest that “To Valencia” on the top of this letter means “To Fritz Valencia”. However, this version is refuted by the existence in the RGASPI of another copy of the same letter, but with different words hand-written on the top: “To Albacete”. So it is much more likely that one copy was due to be sent to the city of Valencia ( indeed, to Fritz V, who spent a lot of time there), the other to the city of Albacete.⁴

One might think that these are tiny unimportant details, but anyone involved in serious research knows how important tiny details sometimes are. The abundance of the ‘raw’, unsorted material together with the scarce commentary riddled with mistakes, somehow drowns the main conclusion the authors seem to come to: that the reports about the Blairs were written by Gustav Szinda and Wilhelm Tebarth. Unfortunately, apart from the ‘graphological analysis’ mentioned above, there is simply not enough evidence to confirm that. Why Szinda and Tebarth and not other German agents, who worked for the NKVD – ‘Moritz, ‘Alfonso’, ‘Willi’? Why ‘Fritz Valencia’ and not ‘Fritz Barcelona’? It would have been interesting to see this discussed. It is regrettable, that in this volume of serious scholarly articles, scholarship should have been suddenly abandoned for the sake of ‘sensational discovery’.

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Masha Karp is The OS Journal Editor

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