Posted by Andrew Cotlov On May - 25 - 2009
In 1943 when George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, his caustic critique of Stalin’s Russia, the Soviet Union was so popular in the United States and Great Britain that he couldn’t find a publisher for his novel. In fact, the Russians were so strongly associated with the fight against the Nazis that it wasn’t until 1945, when the Second World War was over, that Animal Farm was finally published. After reading the manuscript Orwell sent him, TS Eliot wrote a letter of rejection actually explaining that an anti-Russian novel would not fare well in the political atmosphere of the moment. He also said that the novel’s allegory was “unconvincing” and suggested that if Orwell’s goal was to make a case for Trotskyism he should’ve created “more public spirited pigs”.
Indeed, while he was a socialist, Orwell was more enchanted by Trotsky than his counter-part Stalin because he knew about Stalin’s unchecked political power, and the length he was willing to go to maintain it, first-hand. “We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive,” Orwell once wrote, and he wasn’t talking about the skirmishes he was involved in against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, rather; he was talking about the politically charged violence the Stalinists brought with them from Russia when sent to support the Spanish democracy. In Spain, Orwell was in a Trotskyite band of soldiers and later wrote
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