Revealed: Soviet spies targeted George Orwell during Spanish civil war
They had a common enemy in General Franco’s fascist-backed army, but that did not stop legions of communists, revolutionaries and anarchists in 1930s Spain warring among themselves, fuelled by internecine rivalries and paranoia.
Now, new evidence has emerged that one of the most famous international fighters on the Republican side of the Spanish civil war was under surveillance by communist military intelligence.
George Orwell, whose book Homage to Catalonia became a celebrated account of fighting in the civil war, and his wife Eileen were spied on in Barcelona at the time of a vicious internal conflict on the Republican side of the war in May 1937.
Reports on the couple’s actions, lodged in a Moscow archive after the war, were unearthed by author Giles Tremlett while researching a book, The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, published by Bloomsbury on 15 October.
“The papers are documentary evidence that not only Orwell, but also his wife Eileen, were being watched closely. 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 – whose real name was Eric Blair – was among 35,000 idealists from 80 countries who travelled to Spain to fight an uprising against the country’s democratic government in July 1936 led by future dictator General Francisco Franco.
The author had originally intended to sign up with the communist-dominated International Brigades, but was rejected after a fractious meeting with Harry Pollitt, head of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Instead, Orwell turned to the Independent Labour party which backed the anti-Stalinist, pro-Trotsky Poum (the United Marxist Workers party).
In May 1937, internal conflict between Republican forces saw Poum members fighting government troops in Barcelona. The clashes were sparked by Poum and anarchist insistence that carrying out a full-blooded revolution on the Republican side was just as important as defeating Franco – which the government disagreed with.
In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell described a “horrible atmosphere” in Barcelona, the product of “fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues and prowling gangs of armed men”.
Reports on Poum members were drawn up by the International Brigades’ branch of the military intelligence service, which was led by members of the Moscow-based Communist International, Comintern. They show the level of paranoia among a hard core of Stalinists in both the Republican army and the International Brigades.
An elaborate diagram in the archive shows Orwell’s “English group” of the POUM embedded in a web of suppo
sedly suspect groups and individuals with contacts in the International Brigades, including Trotskyites, anarchists, French intelligence and spies working for both Mussolini and the Gestapo.
Eileen comes in for special attention since, while Orwell was away fighting on the front in Aragon, she stayed in Barcelona working for the pro-POUM Independent Labour party. One report, written in German, appears to confirm that Eileen was having an affair with Orwell’s military commander, the Belgian Georges Kopp. “They are in an intimate relationship,” it said. “That is why she sent food, books, newspapers etc… to him in jail.”
The Poum sympathies of another Briton, David Crook, were also under surveillance. But, unknown to communist military intelligence, Crook was, in fact, spying on the Poum on behalf of the Soviet Union’s interior ministry. His hunting grounds included the Independent Labour party offices at Barcelona’s Hotel Falcón and the Hotel Continental, where Eileen and others lived.
The ILP office was a simple target since the British contingent had adopted the long lunches and siestas of the Spaniards, not returning until after 5pm. Crook stole files during these extended lunch breaks, taking them to be copied and replaced before the British returned from their siesta.
Orwell returned to the Aragon front after the May events, but was soon hit by a bullet that caught him in the neck. He was taken to hospital in Barcelona and eventually discharged, but when he returned to the Hotel Continental, Eileen greeted him with a theatrical hug and hissed into his ear: “Get out of here at once!”.
In his absence, the Poum militia had been suppressed and several of his fellow foreign volunteers jailed. Police had raided the couple’s hotel room, taking away a diary and press cuttings.
Orwell slept rough for several nights before he and Eileen crossed the French border by train, sitting in the first-class dining car in order to look like well-heeled British visitors.
The author was unaware of how the murders of thousands of priests by the Poum’s anarchist allies had hurt the struggling Republic’s image, or how badly it needed the arms supplied by Stalin, said Tremlett. “Orwell was just a frontline soldier. He didn’t properly understand how both the Poum and their anarchist friends were harming the fight against Franco.”
Orwell bore no ill will to the International Brigades volunteers, 2,500 of whom were British or Irish. “The International Brigade is in some way fighting for all of us – a thin line of suffering and often ill-armed human beings standing between barbarism and at least comparative decency,” he wrote two months after returning home.
Homage to Catalonia was published in April 1938, but the book’s first run sold just 800 copies. It became popular only after Orwell’s death in 1950.