Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?
The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time?
UPD. From Wikipedia:
>Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the United Kingdom was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated.
However, again, it was wartime. And not one of these wars where your professional army fights far from home against an asymmetrically weaker foe. People tend have fairly negative views of dissenters in that circumstance. Look at what happened in America after 9/11.
In many of the recent wars. Afghanistan/Iraq, or even others like Ukraine.
The US 'group think' is to not criticize the 'people' of the country.
The population is separated from the government. Most media is very pro - "The wonderful people of the country whom surely had nothing to do with the evil government we'd like to see defeated". Criticizing the population is not allowed. Even thought they must have had some influence on their government. Hence how it is very much not allowed to criticize Muslims.
Even in Ukraine, it is not allowed to criticize the "Russian People", who surely are with us against their evil government.
Trotsky, for his part (as well as Lenin) was authoritarian himself. But all of the revolutionaries, including Stalin, were true believers in Communism, and acted accordingly. Orwell likes to present things as a few bad actors that just happened to betray the revolution, which suits his purpose, but that isn't an accurate portrayal.
A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents, to the extent that in the UK some of the people responsible for catching Soviet spies were themselves Soviet spies. The issue was the intelligence agencies recruited exclusively from Oxbridge. The actual working classes in Britain had no time for the USSR, but graduates did.
This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. You can just search journal articles for mention of him to find them:
https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&S...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037...
This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work.
I don't think dismissing (all of) Marx because of Stalin makes much more sense than dismissing the idea of democracy because of the size of the US prison population or it's history of war crimes?
The reason myself and others are so dismissive of Marx's ideas is because time and time again, any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation. Every. Single. Time.
Many of us have grown weary of tankie types trying to shoehorn pro-Marxist viewpoints into these conversations and are pretty quick to identify the dog whistles ("But, but, America!") when we hear them.
Which is that the "revolution was ultimately forced down people's throat whenever they liked it or not.
And due to your vaguely defining "Marxs ideas" thar would then include the Nordic model or any state intervention/run enterprise if we were to stretch it.
And talkies in the modern age is defined as similar to those of the alt right where they either overtly or covertly support every aspect of the Ussr and in particular Stalin shamelessly.
Hence not every Marxist.
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution."
If the man himself agrees that his ideas can only be implemented through a "forcible overthrow", isn't it safe to say that those who follow his teachings today are either purposely ignoring a big part of his message, or are merely biding their time for the next revolution?
It all reads the same to me. In the same way I consider every Nazi a Nazi, I consider every Marxist a Marxist.
They're not some loonie ideas about the size of skulls or a master race.
Your quote without context does indeed proclaim "forcible overthrow"... of all existing social conditions.
If you read it with context in mind it becomes clear that the notion or idea of the revolution is multifaceted as the communist manifesto refers to different means as to how the revolution is spreading (france, germany and Switzerland) and said quote is meant to represent the unrelenting resolution to not conceded to the "bourgeoisie" terms of the social condition upon the working class/proletarian, hence forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions that primarily the working class had to suffer through.
Out of all the things you could pick to critic the communist manifesto this has to be the weakest one, you could bring up the flimsy and quite frankly speaking terrible argument for the abolishing of private property.
Or the assumption that capital is only defined by materialistic definitions.
And now you change your point. Yes all Marxists are Marxists, tankies are not Marxists however, which is what you originally said.
They invented a democracy. Their democracy is of their own design, based on the historical work of philosophers. The constitution is not a plagiarized document stolen from the greeks. Marx was decades dead when 1917 happened.
Your point falls flat on its face.
> any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation
You are one of today's lucky 10,000. Allow me to inform you of the genocide of native Americans, manifest destiny, the slavery of Africans, the toppling of the kingdom of Hawaii, the contras, operation condor, US Imperialism, etc..
Text book example of special pleading.
> But, but, America!
IDK, maybe you shouldn't make such weak fallacious arguments that don't pass even the lightest of scrutiny?
People living in glass Native American burial grounds shouldn't throw stones?
Maybe these """tankies""" are tired of all these first world dronies or diet white supremacists (IDK what you're suppose to be) spewing colonizer propaganda everywhere?
I don't think the notion of fair and equal representation is colonizer propaganda, but based off your previous comments, you're far enough down the rabbit-hole that it's not worth trying to lift you out. I'm not a "diet white supremacist" whatever that is, just someone whose family was murdered in the Holodomor and as a result has done a lot of reading on the USSR and its atrocities.
Be well, I hope someday you can put this hate behind you.
What's hateful about wanting to expand the benefits of democracy to the working class?
Multiple worse real genocides have happened to my people than your historically cyclical-until-1947 famine that's only talked about for the sole purpose of excluding the working class from a better form of democracy.
For instance if you were to read Das kapital, its very much a dry economy book and not some crackpot ranting about capitalism bad.
It was even worse than that. Both the British governments under Chamberlain and Churchill and the US government under FDR sympathized with the USSR. There were continuous sub rosa contacts going on (for example, FDR regularly sent emissaries like Harry Hopkins over to Moscow to confer with Stalin) that were, while not publicly known, officially sanctioned. This was why the USSR was able to end up in control of all of Eastern Europe after WWII--which to any objective observer meant that WWII failed to achieve its primary goal in Europe, which was to liberate Eastern Europe from tyranny. But nobody made any such criticism at the time; the USSR was praised as an ally even while they were shipping millions of Germans and Eastern Europeans to labor camps.
Yes. The reason Britain and France declared war on Germany was that Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France had treaty commitments to defend Poland. (They also had treaty commitments to defend other Eastern European countries, which they decided not to honor when Germany invaded those countries before it invaded Poland, but that was because their governments erroneously believed that Hitler would stop invading countries if they appeased him.)
> I thought the primary goal (of the Allies) was to defeat the Axis powers because they were directly attacking the UK and USA.
Germany never directly attacked the US. (Japan did later on, but that was on their own initiative; they never discussed any overall war plans with Germany.) And when Britain and France declared war on Germany, Germany had not attacked Britain or France either. As I said above, they declared war when Germany invaded Poland.
I think though, that the average Brit did not care so much about Poland. It was clear by that point that Hitler intended to take all of Europe and the exact event that triggered it was maybe not so important. After all it's not like France was wrong to declare war - it was obvious that they were going to be next.
After the Nazis invaded France, I expect that's true, yes. But before that the only reason for Britain to be fighting was over Poland.
> it's not like France was wrong to declare war - it was obvious that they were going to be next
No, it wasn't at all obvious. Hitler's stated purpose, going as far back as Mein Kampf, was that Germany should expand to the east. His decision to move west instead was rather sudden and surprised a lot of his own advisors. And didn't happen until eight months after Britain and France declared war (the intervening period was called the "Phoney War" even at the time).
I think it started before the war. Orwell wrote in 1938 that "today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism',"
While this may be so — although I am sure there were enough intellectuals in both camps — it cannot explain the atmosphere that Orwell is describing:
> At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable.
What is this prevailing orthodoxy? How has it been reached and maintained? What happens to dissenters? What enforces the unprintability of the criticism? To achieve such a level of control, full government and media support is necessary.
It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.
The history of Russia is one of an endless parade of terrible leadership which invariably decides that a quick round of death squads will solve all the problems.
Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism if people were starving in the streets, whereas ultimately the USSR liked to pretend they fixed that while just doing it to the Ukrainians, Polish and other Baltic states.
No. Claiming this underplays how appalling Stalin was. Lenin purging Mensheviks AFAIK, meant losing party membership and maybe emigrating to continue your political project, whereas Stalin's Great Purge killed a million people. This isn't a defence of Lenin, it's just that Stalin was on a different level entirely.
> Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism
What? That's nonsense.
Forced labour camps and secret police organisations were pretty ubiquitous. The Tsars had The Okhrana, forced labour camps and political repression (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had all been exiled to Siberia). The Checka and Gulag were the Bolshevik versions of the same thing. Russia had the White Terror... and then the Red Terror. It all fucking sucks but the point remains, Stalin took things to new levels of psychopathic insanity where we start hitting 10s of millions of excess deaths.
If you don't like Gulags, then bear in mind they were created at roughly the same time the US setup forced labour camps in Haiti that led to 1000s of deaths and extra-judicial killings. Not something Americans talk about much. Should Woodrow Wilson be compared to Stalin too?
I don't know why I keep hoping mgmt will see that one day and decide not to have pretty bad things now that some later nutjob can turn into really especially bad things. It's not much of an up-side that the people who built the tools are often consumed by them.
The best source for getting the picture of this is Malcolm Muggeridge's book Chronicles of Wasted Time; he was a reporter tasked with going to the USSR and telling the Brits about what it was like there, years before WWII. Having believed, like his friends, that it was paradise on earth, it was a shock to discover how terrible it was, and even more of a shock to see his honest reporting junked and to be told to make it out to be more of a paradise on earth.
You can also get the key points from Scott Alexander's review of it. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles...
A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today.
It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky).
It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.
The advantage for Orwell was that he went to Spain to fight for the left, but as a Trotskist, and he and his friend were violently prosecuted, some killed, by the comunist party. You can read about it in his book "Homage to Catalonia".
I've always found it curious that given both what he experienced in Catalonia, and his firm rejection of Stalinism in particular, but really the Bolsheviks as a whole, that he did not move further towards the libertarian socialist side out of fear of the power of the state. Instead he seems to think that the problem brought by the Bolsheviks was mainly the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", rather than the notion of a more powerful state in general.
As much as I love Orwell's writing, I don't tend to find him a very deep thinker. Animal Farm and 1984 are fantastic at ripping apart the surface problems, but juxtaposed against The Lion and the Unicorn, it feels like he just stopped delving deeper than the persons involved and the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and control of the press, and didn't think more about what e.g. allowed Lenin and Stalin to gain control of the Bolsheviks (e.g. he didn't delve into the split that created the Bolshevik faction itself, nor much into the effects of Lenins "democratic" centralism), as if he thought he had sufficiently solved the problem of what made them possible.
[1] https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180531/html.php
[2] "What is needed is that the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere owners who live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share certificates." -- George Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, part 3, section II
It’s also one of the more horrifying things I’ve read and his accounts of trench warfare and hand to hand combat are vicious and grim.
Still pretty popular in philosophy classes when I was in college (class of 2009). Big fan of Castro too, our coursework included at least one picture of him checking out a Cuban collective farm.
>Looking back, I think I erred more as a publisher than as a writer or speaker, and more by omission than commission. I accepted manuscripts about Russia, good or not so good, because they were "orthodox"; I rejected others, by bona fide socialists and honest men, because they were not. It was in the matter of the Trials that the inner conflict was greatest. I well remember a Christmas in Paris when I read the thousand-page verbatim report of one of them : it was like living in some urwelt of intellectual terror, where men had lost, or had never had, the pride of free and independent humanity. But every Tycoon in Britain was using that trial to stir up hatred of Russia, because, twenty-three years ago, she had abolished the exploitation of man by money. So I remembered Bolshevo, and the Red Corner in the Soviet ship, and the Prophylacterium, and the singing of the children when we went, in Moscow, to the Palace of Pioneers ; and I published only books that justified the trials, and sent the socialist criticisms of them elsewhere.
>I am glad to remember that, when directly challenged by questioners at public meetings, I always spoke my mind, giving the pros and cons as honestly as I could ; but I did not strive officiously to speak it, preferring to avoid awkward topics when the choice rested with me alone.
>I am as sure as a man can be — I was sure at the time in my heart — that all this was wrong : wrong in the harm it did to people from whom one was keeping some part of the truth as one saw it ; wrong in the harm it did to oneself (which was important, not because it was oneself, but because oneself was part of humanity) ; wrong in the harm it did to Russia, because that country, in which there is so much greatness and still more hope, can only be injured by a sycophancy that treats her as a spoilt child instead of as an adult with errors and crimes as grievous as our own ; and wrong above all in the harm it did to the sum total of truth and honest thinking, by an increase of which we can alone find the way forward.
Cold War era middle schoolers in the US had that book as required reading in some parts of the country. At least it got us out of reading Shakespeare for a few months.
You don’t assign complex reading to middle schoolers.
Therefore one should trust no system that depends on a few people being trustworthy, the system itself should have self defense mechanisms and limits both in scope and in time, for wielding power.
Communism or at least the soviet flavor failed completely on this last count, and I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. Social democracies seem to have a nice balance but in online discussion it's like people are either Milton Friedman or Marx apologists and nobody in the middle.
I think it was more that a system will abused by the extent to which abuse is possible. Someone benevolent (in the book snowball who was a stand in for Trotsky) will get out maneuvered by someone willing to weaponize all available power (Napolean in the book, Stalin). It’s possible to have someone good for a time (there are occasionally successful monarchs), but the system is not resilient to bad actors.
Norms or good intentions are not enough, you have to look at incentives and what abuse is possible within the system.
The US is a more resilient system (trump failed to hold onto power despite best efforts), but even so it has weaknesses in places governed primarily by norms. A political system needs to be evaluated by its outcomes in practice, not hypothetical “best case” implementations that ignore incentives.
This is true in reverse too: for example, Italians have been tinkering with their electoral system for 30 years now, but one way or the other they continue to change their rulers almost every year. Systems can make some mechanisms more or less awkward, but in the end it's the shared political norms that make the real difference.
I think it’s been working ok, but there are issues (issues they often explicitly predicted), see: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Add...
There is also an element of culture required among the population too that’s necessary.
> “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
Even if no individual retains power, you could still have a particular interest (a corporation, a guild, an industry body, an ethnicity) corrupting the legislative, executive or judicial functions of government in their favour.
The idea that an organization can corrupt a government is just expressing the same issue: the system gets exploited to the extent that exploitation is possible.
At the macroscopic level I think it's fair to analogize humanity as a system searching for equilibrium. But we can also do work on ourselves through technical and cultural revolutions. My foray into the past, watching the present, and my projections of the future all paint the classic "monkeypaw" trope. We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state approximation that we will never let arise. In engineering everything is a compromise, you can't have your cake and eat it too, etc...
Neither Marx nor Friedman are really wrong, per se, but they can't be right, either. From there it's just a matter of moral convictions, at least in my opinion, which paints everything with an even less discernible gray.
Yesterday, i saw people disputing at the internet. I'd not read nor join their conflict, but made my jokes about. For today i intended to read, how and what they said.
Quoting (another Topic on HN) some Posts more: "Further: progress will occur on real-world problems that can be solved by those methods, making those applications dominant throughout society." (especialy everything looks like its natural to someone)
Jesssus! They need a pulling-horse, that dies... (-;
"Taste was bitter at the time, but it was never going to be forever. In 2018 models had 100e6 parameters, and in 2013 GPT4 has (wild guess) 2e12 parameters [0]. Conservatively that's 500% per year. At it's peak, hardware never improved at that rate and has since slowed down dramatically. So it was always going to end, and further advancement was always going to revert being driven by a neural net of some sort." The interesting question when neural net will end up driving it.
"Posits that making a huge model won't be a competitive strategy for long because it gets to expensive in terms of heavy quantization."
# ...you may also like to read about: "KYBERNETIK", "Prozessablaufmaschinen", Bottleneck... (calms)
regards...
You get rid of the need for power entirely. Communism, by definition, is free of state. That hinges on achieving post-scarcity.
The Communist Party’s primary tenant is achieving post-scarcity to one day usher in communism. The Soviet model failed, really, because they never got there. Probably not because of a poor power dynamic, but because post-scarcity was, and still is, beyond our grasp. It may not even be possible.
When you think about it, the Soviet model is fundamentally designed to fail! If everything went according to plan, it would have fallen to communism. It was never meant to be sustainable.
Perhaps you are referring to actionable ideas we have come up with over the years to try and push us towards post-scarcity?
While Communists sometimes proclaimed that as a utopian future, it is hard to see how it could have come to pass. Firstly because communism would need some kind of perpetual enforcement apparatus for its ancillary goals like ensuring an end to religion and belief in the supernatural.
Secondly, that political philosophy put so much emphasis on the working masses as the class to support and identify with, that one doubts it would permit a future where there were no longer any working masses. I’m reminded of some Maoist literature I once found in a Chinatown bookshop: in discussing the Peking Man fossil, the book claimed that what separated Man from the apes was his ability to labor, and if a person did not work hard, he was not a true human being.
That was also the principal criticism against both Marx and later the Bolsheviks from the left: That rather than "need some kind of perpetual enforcement apparatus", given Marx own criticism of the state as a tool for class oppression you could not hope to reform or take over the state without risking a recreation of the same problems as the state tries to maintain its authority, but need to destroy the state immediately. A criticism that precipitated the anarchists leaving the First International, but also many later splits.
With respect to religion, the notion tend to be that ancillary goals like an end to religion would come simply from removing poverty and providing education, from the thinking that people flock to religion to seek comfort when their lives are hard, and so it's not necessary to do anything about it per se.
> that one doubts it would permit a future where there were no longer any working masses.
The very basis for the rise of socialist thought was the notion that the rise of capitalism made a level of productivity possible where the amount of labour necessary to sustain society would drop.
Marx spends the first half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over the productivity increases made possible by capitalism and describes its downfall as coming from crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment - in other words a sharp reduction in the need for labour, but without the social structure to allow the labour and its proceeds to be shared.
So in that sense, maybe still "working masses" but masses no longer limited by a need to maximise hours of work to earn a living.
So I don't think ending religion would be a specific goal, not for me anyway. Of course, if someone starts some cult somewhere or starts telling people some god said they should be in charge well then that's a problem, but I think that goes beyond the specifics of religion.
It always comes back to hierarchies in my opinion. Whether it's racism, sexism, organised religion, capitalism, or whatever–the root of the problem is one group of people having power over others.
The practical problem (of course apart from the moral for the rest of us who are not Marxists) is, how do you exterminate a group of people without a state?
That's why anarcho-Communism/Marxism is an oxymoron, collectivism needs someone to dictate and organize the collective action, it cannot be stateless.
Communism, and thus the state being left behind, cannot happen until post-scarcity is achieved. Once post-scarcity is realized, why would you care if some still hold that mentality? They are only considered to be a hinderance in the days leading up to post-scarcity becoming a reality and during that time there is still a state.
Citation? Multiple searches turned up nothing like this for me.
> That's why anarcho-Communism/Marxism is an oxymoron, collectivism needs someone to dictate and organize the collective action, it cannot be stateless.
This presumes "collectivism", but many forms of socialism sees enabling extreme individualism as the goal. E.g libertarianism was founded by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque
"Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction."
I believe Robert Caro was more insightful than Lord Acton:
Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.
That's true, but it's easy to misrepresent if you don't include another important insight:
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." -- Lord Vetinari (by way of Terry Pratchett)
Because otherwise all bosses would be equally shitty and you would not be able to foresee with uttermost certainty how bad people will become shitty bosses when promoted to power.
It is equally obvious in the military how you know who will turn out to be really bad people once promoted to sergeants.
It's "always bad", not "always equally bad".
The upshot is that "Okay, we just need to find someone who power will reveal is not shitty." does not and cannot work in the general case (of amounts of power sufficently large to be worth abusing - your 'good' sergeants are still sergeants, not generals or absolute autocrats).
You could argue that with more power people will mess up more in absolute terms. If you are powerfully enough small misteps could crush people.
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-abrahamlincoln-pow...
> Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
>The Guardian on 24 August 1945 called Animal Farm "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in Tribune on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in Tribune at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years perhaps, Animal Farm may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point".
Symons's point is that The Guardian and Fyvel called Animal Farm "delightfully humorous" and "gentle satire" because that was the only way they could blunt the sharp attack aimed directly at the USSR, by insinuating that it was not actually serious.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/11/revealed-sovie...
Animal Farm is a great and easy read, but for something much less metaphorical, Homage to Catalunia is a wonderful (and sad) book about Orwell's experience in the war, where both western powers and stalinists had tried to eliminate the smaller and more idealistic faction he fought alongside.