Articles

Orwell and Trotsky

4th May 2022 by Jeffrey Meyers

The political ideas in Orwell’s trilogy—Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four—were profoundly influenced by the theme of Leon Trotsky’s book The Revolution Betrayed (1937). Trotsky (1879-1940), leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, was Commissar for Foreign Affairs and for War from 1917 to 1924, and creator of the victorious Red Army in the Civil War. After Lenin’s death in 1924 Trotsky, his heir apparent, lost his power struggle with Stalin. He was first exiled to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, then to Turkey, Denmark and France, and was finally assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico City.

Orwell’s first encounter with Leon Trotsky nearly killed him. In January 1937 he reached Spain to fight the Fascists in the Civil War and innocently joined POUM (the Unified Marxist Workers’ Party), which was loosely connected to the British Independent Labour Party. He did not know that in December 1936 Stalin, who wanted to control Spain after the Civil War, had denounced POUM as a Trotskyist militia and ordered the Communist leaders in Catalonia to destroy it. POUM’s Secretary Andrés Nin, once associated with Stalin’s arch-enemy Trotsky and Stalin’s most coveted prey in Spain, was arrested and murdered by the Stalinists in June 1937. Orwell, wounded in battle, was hunted by the Communists and could have been murdered before escaping from Barcelona to France in June 1937.

“Spilling the Spanish Beans” (July 1937), published while Orwell was writing Homage to Catalonia, contained his first discussion of Trotsky. This essay informed the British about the political conflict that was fatally weakening the Spanish Left and helping the Fascists win the war. Orwell states, “In Spain, everyone whose opinions are to the Left of those of the Communist Party is sooner or later discovered to be a Trotskyist, or at least, a traitor.” He then gives four increasingly hostile definitions of POUM. At the beginning of the war it “was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the Catalan Government; later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung into jail.” Finally, parodying the Marxist question-and-answer rhetoric, Orwell defines the fatal epithet that was used to condemn Stalin’s enemies: “What is a Trotskyist? . . . The word ‘Trotskyist’ is generally used to mean a disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to split the Left-wing forces.”

Though Trotsky was Stalin’s victim, Orwell thought he was potentially as great a villain as Stalin and that both men had betrayed the revolution. The year before Trotsky was killed, Orwell declared in a surprising speculation, qualified by “probably,” “no certainty” and “though undoubtedly”: “Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind.” Orwell ignores the fact that Trotsky passionately opposed Stalin’s dictatorship from 1924 to 1940, which featured Siberian prison camps, the deliberately created Ukraine famine and the massive slaughter during the Moscow Purge Trials of 1937.

Orwell twice repeated this belief in October and November 1945, just after the Allied victory in World War Two, when the West glorified Stalin as a heroic military leader. In “Notes on Nationalism” Orwell declared: “The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is obviously false, creates the impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference.” He reiterated this belief in “Catastrophic Gradualism”: “[one ought] to admit that all the seeds of evil were there from the start and that things would not have been substantially different if Lenin or Trotsky had remained in control.”

To strengthen his argument Orwell cited the opinion of a fierce Right-wing combatant: “even Wyndham Lewis speaks of Stalin and Trotsky as though they were equivalent persons.” But in his chapter on Orwell in The Writer and the Absolute (1952), Lewis contrasted Trotsky and Stalin and repeated his belief that “today Trotsky and anarcho-syndicalism offer a respectable radical alternative to communism, or ‘Stalinism.’ ” In that chapter Lewis also wrote that after leaving Spain, Orwell showed no sign “of favouring Trotsky: but his remarks about Stalin grew less and less respectful. In his 1940-1 Notebooks, for instance, we find him writing . . . ‘This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten.” Isaac Deutscher’s sympathetic three-volume life of Trotsky (1954-63) confirmed that he was much more cultivated and civilized than the savage Stalin, and suggested that Trotsky would not have tortured and executed most of his generals during the Purge Trials and killed millions of Russian people after that.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke brilliantly predicted that even the best-intentioned revolution was likely to lead to a bloodbath followed by the emergence of a powerful dictator: “Some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. At the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master.”

In The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky furiously defined a similar situation in Russia: “With the utmost stretch of fancy it would be difficult to imagine a contrast more striking than that which exists between the schema of the workers’ state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin, and the actual state now headed by Stalin.” He accurately predicted that the perversion of the Revolution by the powerful dictator was leading straight to defeat in Spain: “The Soviet bureaucracy succeeds, with its treacherous policy of ‘people’s fronts,’ in insuring the victory of reaction in Spain and France—the Communist International is doing all it can in that direction.”

Despite his doubts about Trotsky’s character and politics, Orwell noted that Stalin was exonerated and Trotsky quietly degraded in the British wartime newspapers and radio. The influential Beaverbrook press “seems to be playing down the suggestion that Trotsky’s murder was carried out” by the the Soviet Secret Police. He added that “the BBC celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky.”

In May 1946 Orwell tried to persuade his publisher Fredric Warburg to publish the English edition of Trotsky’s Life of Stalin (1941): “I have read a good deal of it, mostly the bits dealing with Stalin’s childhood, with the civil war and with the alleged murder of Lenin” by Stalin. The earlier parts were “particularly interesting because they demonstrate the difficulty of establishing any fact about a public figure who has been a subject for propaganda. . . . It might be worth trying to get a little more information about the circumstances of Trotsky’s assassination, which may have been partly decided on because of the knowledge that he was writing this very book.”

Trotsky, a more sympathetic figure than Stalin, plays a major role in both Animal Farm (1945). The most important animals in the former are the brutal Napoleon (Stalin) and the more sympathetic and superior Snowball (Trotsky), whose personalities are antithetical and who are always in conflict. Napoleon never presents any of his own plans and always criticizes Snowball’s, though he eventually adopts those plans and even claims that he invented them. He first distorts and then changes history, blames Snowball for all his own failures, accuses him of plotting with foreign enemies, drives him into exile and finally condemns him to death.

Snowball’s name recalls Trotsky’s white hair and goatee, and the fact that he melted before Stalin’s attacks. He is a brilliant speaker, always eloquent and impressive, more vital and inventive than Napoleon, and a much greater writer. Like Trotsky, who commanded the Red Army, Snowball studies military history and leads the army to victory in the Battle of the Cowshed (the Civil War), when foreign powers help Mr. Jones invade the farm (Russia). After the war Snowball was “full of plans for innovations and improvements.”

Orwell describes the crucial moment in Soviet history, which signalled the final defeat of Trotsky: “By the time Snowball had finished speaking, there was no doubt as to the way the vote would go. But just at this moment” Napoleon’s dogs (the G.P.U.) attacked Snowball and forced him to flee the farm and go into exile.” Repeating his favourite comparison, Orwell told his friend George Woodcock, “Trotsky-Snowball was potentially as big a villain as Stalin-Napoleon, although he was Napoleon’s victim. The first note of corruption was struck when the pigs secretly had the cows’ milk added to their own mash and Snowball consented to this first act of inequity.”

In their crucial ideological conflict—which had spilled over into the battle between POUM and the Communists in Spain—Trotsky defended his idea of Permanent Revolution, with its faith in the revolutionary proletariat of the West, against Stalin’s theory of Socialism in One Country, with its glorification of Russia’s unique Socialist destiny. Orwell presents this controversy in simple terms: “According to Napoleon, what the animals must do was to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them. According to Snowball, they must send out more and more pigeons and stir up rebellion among the animals on the other farms. The one argued that if they could not defend themselves, they were bound to be conquered, the other argued that if rebellions happened everywhere they would have no need to defend themselves.”

In the Purge Trials of 1937 Trotsky was accused of sabotaging industry in the Soviet Union. After the destruction of the windmill, Napoleon roars: “thinking to set back our plans . . . this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year. . . . A rumour went round that Snowball had after all contrived to introduce poison into Napoleon’s food.”

Trotsky, the most important enemy of the Soviet state, also becomes a key figure in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky’s passionate condemnation of Stalin’s regime, was the model for Emmanuel Goldstein’s book in Orwell’s novel. Trotsky’s fictional equivalent inspires the rabid screaming fits during the daily sessions of Two Minutes Hate, an emotional substitute for official sexual repression: “As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. . . . It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard. . . . He had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and [like Orwell in Spain] had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. . . . He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.”

In his book, Trotsky quoted Kristian Rakovsky, former Commissar, Ambassador and early victim of the Purges, who defined the oppressive world that Orwell would later create in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “By means of demoralizing methods, which convert thinking Communists into machines, destroying will, character and human dignity, the ruling circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy, which replaces the class and the party.”

Trotsky’s account of the Secret Police appears in Orwell’s portrayal of indoctrinated children who betray their parents and in the sudden “vaporisation” of people like Winston Smith who are suspected of “Thoughtcrime.” Trotsky wrote: “The GPU introduces the sickening corruption of treachery and tale-bearing into the so-called ‘socialist schools’. . . . All who are outstanding and unsubmissive in the ranks of the young are systematically destroyed, suppressed or physically exterminated.”

Winston Smith is fascinated by a photograph of the executed Party leaders Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. This episode was based on an actual accusation made against three men who confessed under torture that they had given important military secrets to Trotsky. The faked photograph proved that the Secret Police had bungled the job and that the confessions were lies. Isaac Deutscher revealed that the “hotel in Copenhagen where three defendants had allegedly had an appointment with Trotsky, had ceased to exist many years before.”

Trotsky and Orwell both understood the dangers that followed the Revolution and saw that Stalin had destroyed equality and freedom while pretending to fight for them.

Orwell’s political trilogy emphasizes loneliness and exclusion, the fearful individual in an oppressed world, the people in Trotsky’s phrase “swept into the dustbin of history.”

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Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, Orwell: The Critical Heritage, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation and Orwell: Life and Art.