OPINION: Orwell, Holodomor, and 1984 in 2024

George Orwell, the classic British author of dystopian novels who rejected totalitarianism in all its forms while being an advocate of democratic socialism, is not always appreciated as much as he deserves for recognizing the importance of Ukraine and the suffering it endured. And the relevance of the Ukrainian experience to him, particularly with regard to the Holodomor, needs to be reviewed in the context of today’s realities and implications for us all.

From the early 1980s into the 1990s, the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was considered the most important foreign witness to the Holodomor. Later, the Welshman Gareth Jones was “rediscovered", and then a third similar courageous figure – the Canadian Rhea Clyman - was also brought out of obscurity to join the ranks of Western correspondents who had dared to report the truth about Stalin’s genocidal use of starvation against the Ukrainians, known as the Holodomor, in the early 1930s.

But as today marks Holodomor Memorial Day 2024 in Ukraine, we should also remember what the famous author of 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell, had to say about this terrible crime against humanity and its significance.

As we know, the reports that Muggeridge and Jones sent to the UK on their return from the Soviet Union about the Holodomor (this name was not used until the 1990s, and the atrocity was usually referred to as an "artificial" or "man-made" famine) were met with disbelief and attacked in the left-wing press.

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Let’s recall that pro-Soviet sympathies were very strong in the West at this time, especially as there were serious concerns about the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. Indeed, in September 1934, 34 out of 39 League of Nations delegates invited the Soviet Union to join the League of Nations, and only three countries (the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland) were opposed.

Jones was killed under suspicious circumstances in Manchuria in 1934, while Clyman, although of Jewish origin, defiantly took her journalism to Nazi Germany but gradually disappeared into obscurity.

The unsuccessful journalist and author Muggeridge eventually managed to find a job in Calcutta and left the country for several years to work in British-ruled India. Later, when he returned to England at the beginning of the Second World War, Muggeridge met and befriended Orwell.

He too was a leftist who had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union after his experiences as a defender of the anti-fascist republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and, as Muggeridge writes in his memoirs, had come under criticism for “exposing the monstrous hypocrisy and chicanery of Communist politics in Catalonia.”

For the record, the Soviet consul general in Barcelona in 1936-37, when left-wing, especially Trotskyist and anarchist forces that did not want to be controlled by Moscow were being crushed by the pro-Soviet communists, was a Ukrainian former Bolshevik, Vladimir (Volodymyr) Antonov-Ovseyenko. Orwell narrowly escaped with his life in June 1937. Ironically, Stalin recalled Antonov-Ovseyenko two months later and had him shot as a “Trotskyist”

Back in England, Orwell wrote a review of the new book Assignment in Utopia by Muggeridge’s colleague in Moscow, the American Eugene Lyons. Like most Western correspondents in Moscow, he had stuck to the Soviet line and denied the Holodomor and the totalitarian nature of Soviet rule. But shortly afterwards, Lyons also broke with the Soviet system and became its open enemy. Orwell’s review appeared in the New English Weekly on 9 June 1938.

Orwell would have noted that Lyons stressed that "The first reliable report of the Russian famine was given to the world by an English journalist, a certain Gareth Jones, at one time secretary to Lloyd George. Jones had a conscientious streak in his make-up which took him on a secret journey into the Ukraine and a brief walking tour through its countryside.”

Significantly, Orwell emphasized that the famine Jones had uncovered was centered on Ukraine, and even gave an estimate of the number of victims. He wrote: “The years Mr. Lyons spent in Russia were years of appalling privation, culminating in the Ukrainian famine of 1933, [during] which it is estimated that no less than three million people died of starvation.”

Orwell was impressed by what he learnt from Lyons’ book about what Jones' had done. He is certain to have used this information, and everything he later learnt from Muggeridge about the famine and the USSR, when writing his classic Animal Farm.

Orwell was not only aware of Stalin’s terrible crimes in Ukraine but was also aware of Ukraine's enormous economic and strategic importance. During the Second World War, when he was working as a journalist for the BBC, he wrote in his diary on March 14, 1942:

Rumors of all descriptions flying around. Many people appear to suspect that Russia and Germany will conclude a separate peace this year. From studying the German and Russian wireless, I have long come to the conclusion that the reports of Russian victories are largely phony, though, of course the campaign has not gone according to the German plan. [I think the Russians have merely won the kind of victory that we did in the Battle of Britain – i.e., staving off defeat for the time being but deciding nothing.] I don't believe in a separate peace unless Russia is definitely knocked out, because I don't see how either Russia or Germany can agree to relinquish the Ukraine.

Three months later, when Orwell heard on the radio that all the male inhabitants of the Czech village of Ladice had been shot as punishment for harboring the assassins of Gestapo chief Rienhard Heydrich, he drew up his own list of the worst atrocities after 1918 atrocities. He included the “Ukraine famine” among them.

While continuing to write for the left as well, Orwell sought to dispel the illusions that many still harbored about the nature of the Soviet Union. His biographer D.J. Taylor notes in his book Orwell The Life that “the anti-Soviet strain that characterized Orwell's journalism in the latter stages of the war had few imitators: even right-wing commentators were keen to keep a low profile in relation to the supposedly benevolent 'Uncle Joe’ [Stalin].”

In the 1940s, Muggeridge and Orwell saw eye-to-eye and bonded. Muggeridge, who celebrated Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 as anti-totalitarian classics, was one of the last to visit his ailing friend on his deathbed, attending his funeral in London in January 1950.

In his 1945 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, Orwell wrote: "The fog of lies and misinformation which surrounds such subjects as the famine in the Ukraine, the Spanish Civil War, Russian policy in Poland, etc., is not entirely due to deliberate dishonesty",” but is tantamount to active collusion with the Kremlin.

Today we can extend this to Russia’s disinformation and fake news about its genocidal war against Ukraine and its 1984-like regime that tolerates no dissent and worships “Big Brother” Putin. And also, to those who seek a cynical deal with despotic Russia at Ukraine’s expense and forget the lessons of the Holodomor, Guernica, World War II, 1984, MH17, Bucha, Mariupol and the existence of the hostile anti-democratic alliance of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.