George Orwell
To the Editors:
While I am in full agreement with Hilton Kramer [in “An Orwell for the Nineties?”, November 1991] that the distopia Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four can only be Stalinist Russia—the best proof of this being, I think, the fervid embrace of the book by countless writers and intellectuals of what was only yesterday the Soviet bloc—the use Mr. Kramer makes of this approaches the Orwellian. Armed with Nineteen Eighty-Four and Michael Shelden’s new biography of Orwell, he uses the books to assert once again the neoconservative goodthink that there is (or was) a singular anti-Communism—the one espoused by himself and his political kin—and not a variety of anti-Communisms, including ones quite distant in approach and temperament from his own.
Mr. Kramer would have us imagine, I suppose, an Orwell of the 1980s issuing position papers from his office at the Heritage Foundation, attending the occasional conference sponsored by the Committee for the Free World, warning of perishing democracies and the historical impossibility of totalitarian societies to topple the Communists who rob them of their freedoms. However, no reader of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell—the four-volume edition which Mr. Kramer himself, many years ago, rightly identified as the true Orwell biography—could possibly imagine Orwell subscribing to this sort of armchair anti-Communism. In his last piece for Partisan Review, published in the winter of 1949—it was a review-essay of Gandhi’s autobiography—Orwell asks, “Is there a Gandhi in Russia at