n 21 August 1936, a minor Bolshevik official
named ES Holtzman told a Russian court
that he had been involved in a Trotsk yist plot
against Stalin. Holtzman was a defendant in
the first major show trial of the period known
as the Great Purge, during which hundreds
of thousands of Soviet citizens were con-
signed to prisons, labour camps and execu-
tion chambers. Holtzman testified that in 1932 he had travelled
to Copenhagen to rendezvous with Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, at
the Hotel Bristol. His evidence helped to convict himself and
the other alleged plotters, all of whom were promptly shot.
A few days after the trial, however, a Danish newspaper
pointed out the significant fact that the Hotel Bristol had been
demolished in 1917. Evidence later emerged that Lev Sedov had
been in Berlin on the day he was meant to have been in Copen-
hagen. Holtzmann’s ‘confession’ could not have been true.
The point of the trial was to prove the existence of an interna-
tional Trotskyist conspiracy as a pretext for purging the Com-
munist Party of anybody who might possibly challenge Stalin’s
rule. The problem for Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, was that
not a shred of incriminating correspondence existed, so all the
‘evidence’ had to come in the form of forced and scripted confes-
sions of face-to-face meetings. The Hotel Bristol error laid bare
the fraudulence of these damning testimonies. “What the devil
did you need a hotel for?” an embarrassed Stalin berated the
NKVD officers who had fabricated the confession. “You ought
to have said that they met at the railway station. The railway
station is always there!” When the official book of the trial was
translated into English, the passage about the hotel was deleted.
One of the people who read about the Hotel Bristol fiasco
was George Orwell, who was closely following Russia’s descent
into full-blown tyranny via the eyewitness accounts of disillu-
sioned communists including Boris Souvarine and André Gide.
Through their pamphlets, Orwell learned about many of the
features of Stalinism that would feed into his great novel Nine-
teen Eighty-Four (1949): the cult of personality; the rewriting of
history; the assault on freedom of speech and thought; the de-
nunciations and forced confessions; and the paralysing climate
of suspicion and fear.
In the novel, Winston Smith is a junior official in the Minis-
try of Truth, the Ingsoc regime’s propaganda ministry, where
he rewrites old newspaper reports to reconcile them with the
latest party line. One day, Winston comes across a stray photo-
graph that proves the notorious traitors Jones, Aaronson and
Rutherford were in New York on the same day that they had
confessed to meeting the Trotsky-like Emmanuel Goldstein
in Eurasia. This may have been Orwell’s tribute to the case
of ES Holtzman.
Orwell called Nineteen Eighty-Four “a novel about the fu-
ture” but it was also a deeply researched story about the recent
past. While she was writing The Handmaid’s Tale (1985),
Margaret Atwood set herself a rule: “I would not include any-
thing that human beings had not already done in some other
place or time.” Similarly, Orwell drew many of the most disturb-
ing elements of his fictional dictatorship of Oceania from totali-
tarian realit y. Many readers in 1949 would have recognised that
most of the events and practices in the novel echoed what
had already unfolded in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
Winston Smith, the enigmatic dictator Big Brother and the
fanatical interrogator O’Brien never existed, but people very
similar to them did. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell insisted, was
not a prophecy but a satirical exaggeration of recent history.
Orwell had endured a brief taste of the “nightmare atmos-
phere” of a police state in 1937, when he was fighting for
the Republic against General Franco in the Spanish Civil
War. The British author fought with the POUM, a small and
vulnerable Marxist movement regarded with suspicion by the
Soviet-backed Republican forces. When Barcelona fell into the
hands of Stalinists, the POUM was accused of conspiring
with both Trotsky and Franco. Orwell was forced to flee for
his life; many of his comrades were not so fortunate. “However
little you were actually conspiring, the atmosphere forced you
to feel like a conspirator,” he wrote in his war memoir Homage
to Catalonia (1938).his was Orwell’s only first-hand experience of
tyranny but he merged these vivid memories
with information culled from myriad conver-
sations, books, pamphlets and articles.
If a first-person account of life in the Soviet
Union or Germany was published in English
or French between 1936 and 1948, then there
is a strong chance that Orwell read it. Details
of totalitarianism that are now commonplace in history books
were leaking out sporadically, and Orwell was busy collecting
them, years before he had the idea for a novel about such a
regime. The paranoia, deceit and betrayal that he had encoun-
tered in Spain had left him with an urgent desire to learn as
much as he possibly could about totalitarian methods.
One of these illuminating books was Assignment in Utopia
(1937) by the American journalist Eugene Lyons, a former
communist and Moscow correspondent who had become
disgusted by Stalinism. Lyons was fascinated by a numerical
slogan designed under Stalin to inspire workers to complete the
Five-Year Plan, a list of economic goa ls, in just four years : “The
formula 2+2=5 instantly riveted my attention. It seemed to me
at once bold and preposterous — the daring and the paradox
and the tragic absurdity of the Soviet scene, its mystical sim-
plicity, its defiance of logic, all reduced to nose-thumbing arith-
metic.” Orwell used the unreal equation in a book review a few
months later and eventually made it a symbolic battlefield in
the psychological war between Winston and O’Brien. In the ALAMY/GETTYIMAGES