Well, now we have the papers of the Soviet Military Archive in Moscow, formally known as the State Military Archive. ‘Document Forty-Two’, in the series dealing with Spain, provides us with the text of a lengthy unsigned report, delivered on 15 April 1937, and forwarded by Georgi Dimitrov to Marshal Voroshilov. The importance of the traffic is emphasized by this very routing: unimportant messages did not go from the head of the Comintern to the chief of the Red Army and thus almost certainly to Stalin himself. (The actual author may well have been André Marty, the French-born Comintern agent for Spain, memorably etched in at least some of his cold hatefulness by Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls.)

In robotic prose, the author characterizes the non-Communist left in the Spanish Republic and specifically Catalonia as ‘fascists or semi-fascists’. He goes on to describe the position of Moscow as ‘absolutely correct on every question’. This slavish stuff might be called routine, but just after a paean to the ‘natural and indisputable’ inevitability of a Communist Party victory, the writer of the report comes to the point. A crisis may be objectively brewing, given the staunchly anti-Russian positions taken by Largo Caballero and his Republican cabinet, but it may still need some subjective assistance. In fact, the duty of the Party involves ‘not waiting passively for a “natural” unleashing of the hidden government crisis, but to hasten it and, if necessary, to provoke it’. The date of this proposal, which also announces that ‘the Party is waiting for your advice on this question’, anticipates the Communist police attack on the Barcelona telephone exchange by a matter of just over two weeks.

The succeeding paper, ‘Document Forty-Three’, was written on 11 May and is the first report back to the Comintern on the mixed results of the action. Regretting the extent to which the POUM and other forces had been able to resist the Stalinist onslaught, the author (whose identity in this instance is uncertain) relays the demand for ‘energetic and merciless repression’ by means of a ‘military tribunal for the Trotskyists’.* There is no need for guesswork about the meaning of this; Professor Peter Davison’s work on Orwell has already established that a Catalan version of the Moscow show-trials was in preparation, and that George Orwell and his wife Eileen would have been in the dock – an NKVD file unearthed in Moscow and dated 13 July 1937 describes them as ‘pronounced Trotskyists’ – had they not managed to slip across the border into France. As it was, many of their English comrades were imprisoned and vilely ill-used, and Andrés Nin, the leader of the POUM, was kidnapped by Stalin’s agents and tortured to death. With each succeeding disclosure from the records of the period, it becomes clearer that Orwell’s free-hand sketch of events was a journalistic understatement.

‘Part of his malaise’, wrote Jennie Lee, who saw Orwell in those terrible days, ‘was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.’ Ms Lee went on to become the wife of Aneurin Bevan, who was also Orwell’s editor and patron at Tribune. Her choice of the word ‘malaise’, and her stress upon regimentation, are both oddly paradoxical. To many supporters of the Spanish Republic, especially to foreigners who did not wish to impose themselves (as well as to those who did), it seemed axiomatic that one should first win the war against a fascist mutiny supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and only then discuss the shape of the future. Orwell, the old Etonian and former colonial policeman, and lifetime foe of affectations and posturings, might have been expected to be highly susceptible to this no-nonsense approach. In fact, in his ‘Notes on the Spanish Militia’, discussing a POUM attack on Huesca, he writes: ‘I was not in this show, but heard from others who were that the POUM troops behaved well.’ It sounds amazingly like a stiff-upper-lip staff officer (‘this show’) of the generation before.