The George Orwell Paradox: From Spy Target to Informant

Listen to A History of the World in Spy Objects podcast: Daniel Arsham - Animal Farm
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Big Brother was watching when Orwell sought work as the Paris correspondent for Workers’ Life and again when he became involved in London’s Booklovers' Corner, a 1930s left-wing bookshop. The chief constable of Wigan, England - a mining town in northern England - also asked Scotland Yard for a briefing on the young writer, who was researching a book about working-class life and staying in an apartment arranged by the local Communist party.

Orwell was seen as a threat, one "dressed in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours", Special Branch noted in 1942. Much like the communist-fearing US during the Red Scare, Britain saw Soviet subversion as ‘an enemy within’ but the spies weren’t quite sure what to make of Orwell. Special Branch described him as a man with ‘advanced communist views’ but MI5 saw him as a man who ‘didn't hold with the Communist Party nor they with him’.

In fact, Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair) was an anti-Stalinist leftist who foresaw a future of thoughtcrime and doublethink, a man whose influence and ideas still resonate in everything from David Bowie's Diamond Dogs to the Bioshock: Infinite video game. His name itself evokes the concept of an 'Orwellian nightmare’, a dystopian scenario characterized by oppressive government control, pervasive surveillance, and the suppression of free thought and expression. 

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Orwellian thought provocateur

Born in India in 1903 and schooled in England, Orwell described his family as 'lower-upper middle class' in The Road to Wigan Pier - a well-to-do family without money. He joined Burma’s Imperial Police for five years but quit abruptly. It was a departure the security services mulled over as Orwell eked out a living as a journalist and writer in Paris in 1928 before returning to England.

He was “a bit of an anarchist in his day and in touch with extremist elements", a record in the files said, describing him as having "undoubtedly strong left-wing views," but "a long way from orthodox Communism". Security files also disclose details from his passport application, noting the tattoo marks on the backs of both hands. 

While Orwell may have had brushes with communism, he adopted an anti-Stalinist stance after fighting in the Spanish War, getting shot in the throat by a sniper, and witnessing communist atrocities first-hand.

While in Spain, the Homage to Catalonia author and his first wife, Eileen Blair, were under the watch of yet another intelligence service, Stalin’s NKVD secret police. Giles Tremlett, author of The International Brigades, found security service papers lodged in a Moscow archive after the war. 

“They add fuel to the thesis that Orwell developed in Homage to Catalonia, and later in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, that Stalin was intent on transforming communism from a social and political ideal into a tyranny headed by a single man,” Tremlett told the Observer.

Orwell’s later satirical work, Animal Farm (1945), is an anti-utopian satire and a commentary on communism under Stalin, a challenge to the oppressive regime.

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