Animal Farm, George Orwell’s masterful allegory about the Soviet Union and Stalinism, went on sale 80 years ago this week. The timing of its release was significant. Orwell had been working on the novel since late 1943, and Imperial Japan’s surrender to end World War II occurred on August 15, just two days before Animal Farm went on sale on August 17.
This means that Orwell, a British socialist, had begun writing his brutal and pitch-perfect takedown of Stalinism and Soviet communism while Stalin was still a close ally of Great Britain against Nazi Germany.
It obviously wasn’t popular to mock the Soviets while they were enduring horrific battlefield sacrifices fighting against the Nazis. But Orwell lived a life of courage rather than popularity.
Earlier evidence of his courage was fighting alongside communists against fascist-supported nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The treacherous purges that his erstwhile Leftist comrades directed towards one another in Spain—while they were all supposed to be fighting fascism—is what provided Orwell with the initial inspiration for Animal Farm.
In 1949, he published his last novel and his masterpiece: Nineteen Eighty-Four. It cemented his legacy as one of the most original critics of communism specifically and totalitarianism generally. As censorship regimes are imposed today by supposedly democratic governments such as Canada and Germany, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains more relevant than ever.
Our InfluenceWatch profile of the Communist Party USA demonstrates that the CPUSA was both a puppet of the Soviet Union and—because of this—behaved as useful idiots prone to the same treacherous behavior Orwell warned about.
From the overview of the CPUSA profile:
The 1921 merger creating the CPUSA was ordered by the Communist International (Comintern), an organization controlled entirely by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the political faction that ruled Soviet Russia (later the Soviet Union). At its founding convention, the CPUSA declared the “inevitability of and necessity for violent revolution” and that the party would prepare for “armed insurrection as the only means of overthrowing the capitalist state.” The CPUSA’s long-term goal of violently overthrowing the American government and capitalism was removed in 1935, on orders from the Comintern, due to the Soviet Union’s concern over the growing threat of Nazi Germany and a desire to form alliances with the capitalist nations (such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Democrats in the United States) against fascism.
Throughout its history, until the demise of the Soviet Union and its ruling communist party in 1991, the CPUSA would continue to adhere to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union regarding when to radically and abruptly shift between participation in (or antagonism towards) mainstream American political institutions. Notable examples of CPUSA shifts in alignment with Soviet doctrine include the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, after which the CPUSA shifted from cooperation with FDR’s administration to hostility toward it; Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, after which the CPUSA was ordered to return to its cooperative attitude toward FDR and his allies; and the outbreak of the Cold War after 1945, when the CPUSA adopted an adversarial attitude toward the administration of President Harry Truman.
From the late 1920s and through the Cold War, the CPUSA and its highest officers provided substantial assistance to Soviet espionage agencies spying on the United States, leading historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes to state that it was “a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War.” Soviet archives unveiled after the Cold War revealed that between 1971 and 1990 the CPUSA had received subsidies of $40 million from the Soviet Union.
The full profile is here: Communist Party USA (CPUSA)
