Across the Blocs

Exploring Comparative Cold War Cultural and Social History

Patrick Major, Rana Mitter, Patrick Major, Rana Mitter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135755669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book asks the reader to reassess the Cold War not just as superpower conflict and high diplomacy, but as social and cultural history. It makes cross-cultural comparisons of the socio cultural aspects of the Cold War across the East/West block divide, dealing with issues including broadcasting, public opinion, and the production and consumption of popular culture.

'Some Writers are More Equal than Others': George Orwell, the State and Cold War Privilege

TONY SHAW

George Orwell's reputation for intellectual integrity and political independence came under the microscope in 1996 when declassified documents proved that shortly before his death in January 1950, the author had had secret dealings with the British Foreign Office's new anti-communist propaganda outfit, the Information Research Department (IRD). The records showed that not only had Orwell expressed his 'enthusiastic approval' of the IRD's techniques and aims, he had also furnished the secret organization with a list of 'crypto-communists' and 'fellow-travellers' in the arts, Fleet Street and Parliament whom it ought not to trust.¹ These revelations sparked a public row among politicians, journalists and academics about Orwell's revered honesty and his relationship to the Cold War. The veteran Labour Member of Parliament Tony Benn was shocked and disgusted to learn that Orwell had 'given in' to official blandishments, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill called Orwell 'two-faced', while the left-wing journalist Paul Foot labelled him a 'McCarthyite' informer. Others, including the former editor of The Observer, David Astor, and the political scientist (and Orwell biographer), Bernard Crick, staunchly defended Orwell's actions on the grounds that he was protecting democratic socialism against the very real threat posed by Stalinism.² Since 1996, a host of historians, political scientists and literary scholars have added to the debate about Orwell's IRD connections. While some like Frances Stonor Saunders have criticized Orwell for having confused the role of the intellectual with that of the policeman, the majority - like Peter Davison and Timothy Carton Ash - have put their weight behind Crick and Astor. Another of Orwell's supporters, the eminent Soviet historian, Robert Conquest, managed to muddy the waters of the debate by proudly admitting to having been on the IRD's payroll during the Cold War.³

The above war of words forms part of the struggle over Orwell's works and reputation after the Cold War. What this article focuses on instead is the struggle to 'claim' Orwell's name (legend, even) during the Cold War. As Orwell scholar John Rodden reminds us, literary reputations are made, not born, and variously built, fashioned, manufactured, suppressed and distorted. George Orwell's image and legacy was contested feverishly in the decades following his death from tuberculosis at 46 years of age in 1950. More specifically, a myriad of politicians, intellectuals and commentators argued about what Orwell's stance on the Cold War would have been had he lived to see the conflict reach its maturity. While some did this out of intellectual curiosity, many others did so in order to strengthen their own position in the Cold War.⁴ This article seeks to cast a fresh perspective on this discourse by scrutinizing the indirect role that official Western propagandists played in it, and by examining the part these officials had in raising Orwell's profile to the dizzy heights that it achieved during the Cold War. The study focuses above all on why, how, and with what effects the British and American governments used Orwell's two best known novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), as part of their anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda campaigns. My analysis is divided into three parts. The first section outlines why Orwell and his works were so valuable to Western propagandists. The second section examines the part that British and American propaganda officials played in disseminating Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four world-wide in print form. The final section looks at how the novels were transferred to cinema and television screens and at the political changes the books underwent in the process. The article concentrates throughout on the period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. This was the formative stage of the Cold War and the period during which Orwell's legendary status was established. I hope this study adds to our understanding of how politics and literary culture interacted during the Cold War, and how popular Cold War images could be formed with clandestine assistance from government.

George Orwell - Public Asset Number One

Having spent a good deal of his writing career alerting people to the systematic misuse of language in modern politics,⁵ and having penned scripts for the Indian section of the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC's) Eastern Service during the Second World War,⁶ George Orwell would surely not have been surprised to see his work being posthumously exploited by governments during the Cold War's battle for hearts and minds. Indeed, as we shall see, Orwell himself was quick to turn Animal Farm to the West's advantage in the late 1940s. But what was it about Orwell the man, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular, that official Western propagandists found so appealing, so much so that they were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting them? There would appear to be at least four main reasons for this.

The first and most obvious reason was that Orwell was a man of the Left. Through books like The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), his eyewitness account of the ravages of unemployment, his near death when fighting for the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, his vocal opposition to the British Empire, together with his patriotic calls for the socialist transformation of Britain during the Second World War (best exemplified in the bestselling The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941), Orwell was to many people a socialist paragon. Because he had never actually been in the Communist Party, Orwell lacked the 'inside knowledge' that former party members like his friend and fellow author, Arthur Koestler, could bring to their denunciations of Soviet communism during the Cold War. Yet, to official propagandists in Britain and the United States, Orwell's distance from the Communist Party rendered him less of a tainted 'fanatic', and one whose longstanding social democratic ideals might help win over the doubters on the liberal or non-communist Left to the West's cause. In sum, Orwell's radical, left-wing reputation would ensure wider currency, stronger credibility and greater efficacy in the officials' ideological battle against the Soviet Union.

The second reason revolved around Orwell's reputation for being an outsider. To this day (despite the body-blow of the 1996 revelations), Orwell's image remains that of a troublemaker, an activist, novelist and essayist who refused to succumb to political or social orthodoxy. A perfect example of this was Animal Farm itself, which many publishers passed over in 1944 and 1945 - with the help of a warning from the Ministry of Information - partly due to its allegorical depiction of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin's brutality.⁷ Orwell's independence of mind formed the basis of his reputation for political and artistic integrity; this might help to explain why his warnings about the dangers of writers being turned into captive animals in Nineteen Eighty-Four and elsewhere struck such a chord with many of his readers.⁸ Orwell was a supporter of Attlee's ruling Labour Party in the late 1940s but this never stopped him criticizing government policies he found objectionable. In one of his last essays he spelt out his desire for 'a Socialist United States of Europe' independent of Russia and America, which many took as a broadside against Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin's apparent pro-Americanism.⁹ Such views appealed to those inside and outside the Labour Party in the late 1940s who wanted British social democracy to act as a 'Third Force' in international relations, between American capitalism and Soviet communism. While these criticisms made for uncomfortable reading among IRD officials, the advantage was that they confirmed Orwell's autonomy.¹⁰

The third reason relates to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four themselves. For a start, both books were short, direct and written in Orwell's characteristically clear style, making them accessible to almost everyone, including, in Animal Farm's case, children. This made them easily translatable and suitable for radio and cinema adaptation. At the same time, the novels were multi-layered, and psychologically and politically complex, and thus could be a challenge to the literary-minded. This is why most critics adored the books, and why both novels suffered ideological misreadings.¹¹ Orwell in fact aimed to project two principal themes in Animal Farm: first, to 'expose the Soviet myth', and, by extension, to condemn tyranny universally; and secondly, and more positively, to show that the Stalinists had betrayed the Bolsheviks' original intentions and thereby to express his faith in the ultimate achievability of socialism.¹² In essence, Nineteen Eighty-Four was a natural extension of these themes and was intended as a warning against the threat of totalitarianism, whether from the Left or the Right.¹³ However, given that Animal Farm was so incisive a fable on the history of Soviet communism, and that Nineteen Eighty-Four had not only been written during the early years of the Cold War (it was published in June 1949, just after the collapse of the Berlin Blockade) but also that the 'comrades' and show trials depicted in the book obviously drew so heavily on Stalin's Russia, it was relatively simple for the British and American governments to deploy the two novels as straightforward anti-Soviet propaganda. Moreover, the fact that the books did not mention communism directly, and that they were novels rather than essays or pamphlets, made them appear less like propaganda (as most people understood the word), thus rendering them potentially more persuasive.

Finally, Orwell's death in 1950 cleared the way for officials and others to appropriate his name and work without fear of contradiction from the man himself. Orwell was extremely protective of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both before and after their publication. He vehemently opposed the latter being 'mucked about with' by publishers, and consistently corrected misinterpretations of key aspects of the novels. He was particularly distressed by the use to which right-wing Cold Warriors put his writings in his later years.¹⁴ After January 1950 this policing role was primarily left to his widow, Sonia Blair, but her insistence on the right to vet adaptations of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four frequently fell on deaf ears. Orwell's 'tragic' early death, robbing the literary world of someone who had been cut off in his prime, also undoubtedly helped foster his legendary status, and consequently boosted the sales and authority of his works. Soon labelled by some intellectuals and politicians a 'prophet' or 'saint',¹⁵ Orwell for Western propagandists became a malleable, prized asset whose powerful rhetoric and vision would be 'clarified' and then spread as deeply and as widely as possible.

War of the Words: Pressing Orwell into Western Service

Orwell became famous in Britain when Animal Farm was published by Seeker and Warburg in August 1945. In what John Rodden has described as 'probably the single most significant event for expanding Orwell's reputation in his lifetime', the fable was then selected as a September 1946 Book-of-the-Month Club choice in the United States. During 1946-49 the book so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• East is East and West is West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War
• 'The Man Who Invented Truth': The Tenure of Edward R. Murrow as Director of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy Years
• Soviet Cinema in the Early Cold War: Pudovkin's Admiral Nakhimov in Context
• Future Perfect? Communist Science Fiction in the Cold War
• The Education of Dissent: The Reception of the Voice of Free Hungary, 1951-56
• The Debate over Nuclear Refuge
• 'Some Writers are More Equal than Others': George Orwell, the State and Cold War Privilege
• Abstracts
• Notes on Contributors
• Index