Ask Joan Crawford--George Orwell
by One Angry Blonde / September 2004

Ask Joan Crawford--George Orwell:
Trotskyite reactionary or subversive Fifth Columnist?

Today is mailbag day, where we answer your reader queries. Today's first letter comes from Confused in Dull, Tennessee, who writes:

Dear Joan Crawford,
Last year, our uncle died. Along with his tweed smoking jackets and a wooden duck collection, he bequeathed several rental properties and a box full of vintage copies of the Lityurnaya Gazetta, the Soviet literary magazine. Having a special interest in literary criticism, I was ecstatic. My pleasure turned to dismay, however, when I turned to an article by Mendle Ledbedev in the June, 1951 issue that said, "George Orwell, once a comrade in the struggle against imperialist aggression, betrayed the cause with his anti-utopian reactionary screeds, 1984 and Animal Farm, where he aligned himself with the military-industrial state and attacked by proxy the Soviet people's republic." I was stunned. I always thought that Orwell was a Progressive and a fellow Socialist. By the way, I'm 25 years old.
Confused in Dull

Dear Confused,
You're too young to remember, but the fall of the Soviet Union resulted not only in a complete literary revisionism in the United States, but also a reflective reassessment in the Dada-Anarchist community. Remember that the Bolsheviks co-opted not only the revolutionary oeuvre of the Mensheviki, but also the deconstructionist tendencies of the anti-emperial revolt. The Tsar was essentially a Western puppet, propped up for the purpose of exploiting the mineral resources of Siberia, making Russia, by default, a colonial extension of the Western monetarists.

I firmly believe that had the Mensheviks succeeded in retaining power after the March, 1917 revolution, we would have avoided the fiasco that resulted when the world was presented with the appearance of a worker's revolt in the following November, but instead, merely regained the tools of the emperial state, along with instruments of torture and an extensive prison system (which, keep in mind, was developed decades before Stalin seized power from the Politburo).

By 1951, all pretense of revolutionary fervor had disappeared from the Communist Party's talking points, and with the disappearance of a two-party system, the completion of media consolidation, and a series of compliant "colonies," the last vestige of a free society--decent literary criticism--also vanished.

So, I can safely say that your copies of the Lityurnaya Gazetta are probably worthless. You might try putting them up on Ebay, however. Just the other day, I saw a copy of a 1885 edition of The Wealth Of Nations that sold for $1.50.
Joan