Orwell’s list of shame:
The documented truth and the fabrications added to it
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| George Orwell (1943) |
The short answer could be neither "Yes, I did" nor "No, I didn’t". Mayakovski’s account was not entirely invented: it rested on an important and ugly historical fact. But that fact had been so thoroughly mixed with errors and unsubstantiated claims that I could neither accept the post as accurate nor dismiss it altogether.
This is what Mayakovski wrote:
George Orwell handed over to British and American intelligence services in 1949 a list containing 38 names of famous individuals "suspected of sympathizing with communism," among them Charlie Chaplin.
Orwell had been acting since the mid-1940s as a paranoid informant, jotting down in a notebook all sorts of communist journalists, activists, writers, and artists whom he considered suspect for having "pro-Soviet sympathies" and deserving of boycott for not being Trotskyists like him; he ended up noting down more than 135 communist activists.
In 1949, he finally delivered 38 "suspects of being communists" to Western intelligence services while he was in the hospital, handing them over name by name to Celia Kirwan, a British spy, so that they could be pursued and have their lives destroyed—not only through imprisonments as in the U.S., but also by preventing them from being hired in their jobs.
In addition to Charlie Chaplin, the list included figures such as the writer George Bernard Shaw, the historian E.H. Carr, the biographer Isaac Deutscher, or the actor Michael Redgrave.
At first glance, this is a striking post, particularly for anyone unfamiliar with the subject. Moreover, at its centre lies a real episode that came to light many years ago: in 1949, Orwell gave a covert British state propaganda unit a list of people he had classified according to their political views. This is unquestionably a stain on his record that cannot be minimised or covered up. Precisely for that reason, there is no need to make the episode appear still more terrible by adding claims that the evidence does not support.
A stain on Orwell’s record
The first article I read on the subject was George Orwell and the British Foreign Office, published on 9 September 1998 by Fred Mazelis, a regular contributor to the World Socialist Web Site. I subsequently pursued this troubling episode in Orwell’s life through other sources as well.
The broad outline of the established facts is as follows. From the mid-1940s, Orwell kept a private notebook containing the names of people he believed to be Stalinists or sympathetic to the Soviet Union. It did not consist solely of declared Communist Party members. Some entries were speculative; others contained crude personal judgements rather than political assessments. Antisemitic and homophobic remarks beside certain names showed how ugly a document the notebook was in human as well as political terms.
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| Celia Kirwan |
By 1949, Orwell was seriously ill with tuberculosis. His friend Celia Kirwan worked for the Information Research Department (IRD), established within the British Foreign Office. The IRD was a semi-secret state unit created at the beginning of the Cold War to conduct propaganda against the Soviet Union and communism. Orwell selected 38 people from his private notebook and sent their names to Kirwan. He described them as people whom the IRD should neither trust nor employ in its anti-Communist propaganda activities.
What we have, then, is neither a few innocent personal opinions exchanged between friends nor a private notebook that remained in Orwell’s drawer. Orwell knowingly passed a list of people he deemed politically ‘unreliable’, together with their occupations and his assessments of them, to a covert propaganda arm of the British state. There is no political or moral defence for that decision.
Özcan and I discussed the matter briefly on WhatsApp. But it is difficult to set out a considered position through that kind of exchange. To explain my view more fully, and to share it with a wider audience, including the person who had posted the original claim, I replied to Mayakovski with the following X thread:
What is true, and what has been made up?
1) The central fact is not in dispute. From the mid-1940s, Orwell kept a private notebook containing the names of people he regarded as Communists, ‘crypto-Communists’, fellow travellers or Soviet sympathisers. It eventually contained 135 names.
2) The notebook is itself disturbing. Some entries are speculative; others contain crude personal judgements and, in certain cases, antisemitic or homophobic remarks. Orwell was not simply recording declared Communist Party members.
3) In 1949, while gravely ill with tuberculosis, Orwell selected 38 names and sent them to his friend Celia Kirwan, who worked for the Information Research Department (IRD), a semi-secret propaganda unit within the British Foreign Office.
4) Orwell knew that the list would reach Kirwan’s department. He described those named as people who should not be trusted as anti-Communist propagandists and even remarked that it was useful to have those who were ‘probably unreliable’ listed.
5) Charlie Chaplin, E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher and Michael Redgrave were among the 38. George Bernard Shaw, often mentioned in accounts of the affair, appeared in Orwell’s larger private notebook, but apparently not in the final list sent to the IRD.
6) This was unquestionably political collaboration with a covert state propaganda apparatus. The familiar defence that Orwell was merely sharing private thoughts with a friend is therefore inadequate. His conduct deserves serious political and moral criticism.
7) But the embellished version goes considerably further than the evidence. Orwell did not hand the list to ‘British and American intelligence services’. It went to the IRD. No evidence has emerged that he supplied it to the CIA, MI5 or MI6.
8) Nor is it accurate simply to call Celia Kirwan a "British spy". She worked for a secretive Foreign Office propaganda department with links to the intelligence world. That is troubling enough, but it is not the same as proving that she was an intelligence agent.
9) There is also no evidence that Orwell submitted the names so that those concerned could be imprisoned, persecuted or deprived of employment. The immediate purpose was to identify people whom the IRD should not recruit for its anti-Communist propaganda work.
10) The surviving IRD file records no subsequent action against the 38. One person named, Alaric Jacob, later suffered professional sanctions at the BBC, but no evidence has been found connecting those sanctions to Orwell’s list.
11) The claim that Orwell had acted as an informant since the mid-1940s is likewise misleading. He had kept his objectionable private notebook since then; the documented act of supplying names to a state body occurred in 1949. These are not identical claims.
12) Nor was Orwell a Trotskyist compiling a blacklist of non-Trotskyists. He was a "democratic socialist" and an opponent of Stalinism, but not a follower of Trotsky. Indeed, Isaac Deutscher -Trotsky’s celebrated biographer and a Marxist critic of Stalin- was on the list.
13) The sound conclusion is therefore neither to exonerate Orwell nor to invent a larger conspiracy. He did provide a secret British state propaganda body with a political reliability list. That was a grave and indefensible act.
14) But there is no evidence that he supplied British and American intelligence services with names so that people could be imprisoned, blacklisted or have their lives destroyed. The documented truth is damning enough; it requires no sensational additions.
Defending the truth without exonerating Orwell
From what I have read so far, I have encountered two mistaken responses to this dark episode in Orwell’s life. The first tries to minimise what he did, reducing the list to the private thoughts of a dying writer shared with a friend. Yet the list did not remain in Orwell’s drawer, or within the bounds of a private exchange. It reached a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit of the state. Orwell knew where he was sending it and what purpose it would serve. In other words, he made a conscious political choice.
The second response finds his actual offence insufficiently grave and turns it into a vast tale of informing involving the CIA, MI5 and MI6 at once, with the aim of having people imprisoned, dismissed from their jobs and their lives destroyed. Such additions do not strengthen the criticism of Orwell. They weaken it by making that criticism depend on claims that are easy to refute. They also allow Orwell’s admirers to point to the errors and avoid confronting the documented facts. Needless to say, the X user Daniel Mayakovski exemplifies this second approach.
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| Emblem of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which George Orwell joined in June 1938 after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell defended "democratic socialism" and opposed totalitarianism for the rest of his life, but he was never a Trotskyist. |
For socialists, Orwell’s list offers a striking example of how opposition to Stalinism does not, by itself, produce genuinely revolutionary or socialist politics. During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell witnessed the Stalinists’ role in crushing the revolution and wrote about it with great courage. After the war, however, instead of continuing the struggle against Stalinism on the basis of the working class’s independent, internationalist and revolutionary politics, he chose to collaborate with the propaganda apparatus of British imperialism. His justified hostility to Stalinism did not prevent him from siding with the capitalist state.
This is why the claim that Orwell was a Trotskyist is particularly misleading. Trotsky, the Left Opposition, the International Left Opposition and, ultimately, the Fourth International fought the Stalinist bureaucracy on the basis of socialist revolution and proletarian internationalism. Orwell, who called himself a ‘democratic socialist’, never followed or represented the political line of the Trotskyist movement. Moreover, he included Isaac Deutscher, a Marxist critic of Stalin and a biographer of Trotsky, on the list he gave to a state institution. That example alone exposes the inconsistency of Mayakovski’s claim that Orwell was recording people because they were not ‘Trotskyists like him’.
Fred Mazelis’s article mentioned above ends with the following sentence:
Those who today praise Orwell as a solitary opponent of Stalinist [sic] are the same ones who deliberately censor any mention of Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Fourth International.
Twenty-eight years have passed, but that observation remains valid today.
There is no need either to cover up what Orwell did or to make him appear more villainous by attributing unproven crimes to him. The historical truth must be presented in all its contradictions. Only then can we draw the necessary lessons from it: Orwell opposed the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but because he failed to ground that opposition in an independent socialist perspective of the working class, he ultimately entered into political collaboration with the British state’s Cold War apparatus. That is the central lesson.
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