A Rare Perspective On Orwell’s Era, and Our Own
BOOK REVIEW: GEORGE ORWELL AND RUSSIA BY MASHA KARP
Red Square showing part of the Moscow Kremlin, March 2019 © James Rodgers
This post is a review of Masha Karp’s George Orwell and Russia (Bloomsbury). The review is published in the current issue (25:10) of the academic journal ‘Journalism’, and that version can be found here.
AS 2022 DREW TO A CLOSE, it had already long been clear that the escalation of Russia’s war
on Ukraine would not lead to any kind of lightning-fast military success. The Kremlin had
adjusted its control of information accordingly. Draconian laws, hastily introduced in the
aftermath of the major invasion 10 months earlier, had decreed that the war was not
actually a war. It was ‘a special military operation’. Not referring to it as such meant a
reporter risked prison. There was one notable news story that did get published. George
Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was the bestselling fiction title in Russia that year.
That is just one reason why Masha Karp’s George Orwell and Russia is so timely.
Karp, an accomplished journalist, translator, and Orwell scholar, tells the remarkable story
of how Orwell captured the essence of a totalitarian regime in a country he never visited.
Karp begins with the influence of Eugene Adams, known as Eugene Lanti on the youthful
Orwell. Lanti was the partner of Orwell’s favourite aunt and his goal was to bring down
capitalism—with the help of the universal language Esperanto. He sought support during
visits to the Soviet Union but the experience left him completely disillusioned when he
discovered the true nature of the workers’ paradise under construction on the other side of
Europe.
Another influence Karp describes—and her inclusion of it is welcome, as the work is
not as well known today as its historical value merits—is Eugene Lyons’ 1938 book
Assignment in Utopia, about his correspondent posting to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Lyons
also left the union disappointed, his disappointment no doubt increased by conversations
like one with ‘a prominent Russian newspaperman,’ whom Lyons had asked how much in
the Soviet press could be believed. ‘If it’s printed, it’s truth for us. We don’t know and
don’t care about bourgeois notions of facts,’ replied the Soviet journalist (Lyons, 1938:
106). Big Brother would be proud.
If Orwell never did visit Russia, Russia—in its most poisonous form—very nearly
visited him. Karp makes a persuasive case, backed with plentiful historical context,
that Orwell’s too-close-for-comfort experiences of Soviet secret police activity when
he fought in the Spanish civil war taught him plenty about Stalinism—without his
having to visit the land whence it came. This experience gave him a perspective which
other left-leaning western intellectuals lacked. As Orwell pointed out in an essay on Arthur
Koestler, ‘there has been nothing resembling…Darkness at Noon because there is almost no
English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from inside.’
Orwell’s ability to overcome that, is what spoke to Soviet audiences. Karp cites Gleb
Struve, a Russian émigré who, in the west, became an influential leading scholar of
Russian literature, on Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘not a utopia, but a satire.’ While the
murderous excesses of Stalinism had abated by the time Karp herself received a clandestine copy in 1970s Leningrad, the danger had not passed altogether. Karp begins her introduction telling the story of her mother asking, ‘Is it safe to keep this book at home
overnight?’
This personal insight is one of the book’s great strengths. Karp offers a rare perspective
not only on Orwell’s era, but also on our own. I should mention here that some 20 years
ago Karp and I were briefly colleagues at the BBC Russian Service. I remember even
then—this was 2004, the early years of Putinism—her being keenly aware of the threat
she saw emerging. She writes of a small number of experts trying then, ‘to draw the
attention of politicians and the public to dangerous developments in Russia, but they were
not heard.’ Karp is too modest to make it clear that hers was among those voices. She has
of course been completely vindicated.
Karp is also good on Orwell’s relevance to the way that Putin has suffocated what was a
vibrant, bold, and tireless journalism culture in Russia in the early post-Soviet years. Her
analysis of the significance of the campaign to silence the NTV channel after its reporting
of Chechnya is sound. Less convincing, though, is her suggestion that Putin won the
information war in presenting Chechnya to the west. Dissenting voices, including those of
Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova, were silenced by death. But no one really
buys Putin’s assertion that the Kremlin’s bloody campaign to suppress separatism at
Russia’s southern edge was somehow part of a justified global ‘war on terror’.
George Orwell and Russia is engaging, scholarly, and thought-provoking. It is timely
history. Just ask those many Russians who bought Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2022. Better
still, ask Anastasia Rudenko and Dmitry Silin. They decided to give out free copies in the
Russian city of Ivanovo in the early weeks of the war. They were arrested for ‘discrediting
the Russian army.’