Orwell & the Communists in Spain.

 

Bob Edwards MP

George Orwell spent six months in Spain and got shot through the neck on the Aragon front. His wife, Eileen, also went to Spain. Both of them were involved with a Marxist group called the POUM. The Communists denounced the POUM as Trotskyists and planned to liquidate them. I believe Orwell and his wife were on the death list. They were being spied on and there were NKVD agents working in the POUM offices in Barcelona.

These were not idle threats because the Stalinists had murdered the POUM leader, Andres Nin. Orwell and his wife fled Spain not because of Franco, but to get away from the communists who were murdering Republicans. Orwell never forgot or forgave this treachery.

Orwell was never really popular with the British communists.  They didn't like him because he was an Etonian with a posh accent and fought with the anti-Stalinist POUM. They thought he was in Spain to get material for a book. One person called him a "supercilious bastard" and the CPGB leader, Harry Pollitt, from Droylsden, accused Orwell of slumming it. The POUM had fraternal affiliations with the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and Orwell was in the ILP.

Bob Edwards, who also fought with the POUM, had mixed feelings about Orwell, but he didn't doubt his bravery under fire. Edwards became a Labour MP and was later exposed as a KGB British agent by the Soviet defector, Oleg Gordievsky. As a youth, Edwards had met both Stalin and Trotsky in the Soviet Union in 1926. Edwards received in secret, the Soviet Union's third highest medal, the 'Order of the People's Friendship'.

Orwell's book, 'Homage to Catalonia', is probably the book that most British people encounter when they first read about the Spanish Civil War. Having read books on Spain by the historian Paul Preston, I was struck by his determination to trash the reputation of Orwell when it comes to his personal account about the Spanish Civil War. Orwell wasn't a professional historian, but he fought in Spain and lived through those events, and Preston didn't.