The likelihood that the Red Army would have stopped fighting Hider in 1944 for this reason was clearly not very great, but conformist and loyalist opinion is always easy to elicit and the evidence that publisher Jonathan Cape, for example, dropped the book on Smollett's instigation is very strong. (Smollett himself was later exposed as an agent of the Soviet secret intelligence, whose job was to defend the prestige of Stalinism rather than to support the war effort.)

Other publishers like Victor Gollancz—a leftist sympathiser who had printed earlier Orwell works—needed no persuasion in denying him an audience for the twentieth century's most successful satire. In the end, the small house of Seeker and Warburg agreed to publish Animal Farm in a very small edition, for an advance of forty-five English pounds (or $2,020 expressed in today's value).

However, a group of Ukrainian socialists, living in refugee camps in post-war Europe, got hold of a copy of the book and immediately understood its profound relevance. They contacted Orwell, who agreed to write the only introduction to Animal Farm that he ever composed, and who gave them the right to reprint the work in the Ukrainian language, for free. This edition was distributed among refugees in Germany, but most copies were seized by the American military authorities (this, well after the war against Hitler was over) and handed over to the Red Army to be burned.

In the United States, the book fared somewhat better. Though it was originally refused by the Dial Press on the absurd grounds that animal stories did not sell well in America, and though it was declined by Angus Cameron of Random House after Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had sent him a copy (Cameron was a leading Communist fellow-traveler), it did eventually see print, from Harcourt, Brace, in 1946. By that time, Orwell had only a few years to live and was to exhaust himself physically and mentally by writing and then typing out 1984. The contrast between the two books is an extraordinary one, which partly reflects Orwell's own race against time.

Animal Farm, with its original tongue-in-cheek subtitle "A Fairy Story," is biting but essentially good-natured. The pastoral setting has a reassuring patina; Mr Jones, the wicked farmer, is also a figure of farce. The fate of some creatures, most obviously the noble work-horse Boxer, has additional pathos and tragedy—in Boxer's case because of his dumb, equine bravery—but the pigs are the pigs and they are amusing as well as nasty in their anthropomorphism. (Many children have enjoyed the book for its own sake, heedless of the history of the Soviet Union and its ruthless, witless collectivisation, and Martin Amis in Money has a hilarious passage in which his dumb-ox of a narrator, John Self, is given a copy of the novel and laboriously makes the self-same mistake.)

In 1984, by contrast, Orwell made extensive and almost melodramatic use of his own buried knowledge of cruelty. In his life, he had witnessed sadistic and authoritarian behavior among small boys at English boarding-schools, again while serving as a policeman in colonial Burma and further as a journalist pretending to be a loser in slums and sweatshops. He had also gained first-hand experience of political terror as a fighter against both fascism and Stalinism in Spain. The novel makes a double-distillation of every nightmare of monstrous entrapment and powerlessness to which the average human brain is vulnerable. It also makes an almost conscious attempt to destroy the very concept of hope. Those who read it first, like its original publisher Fredric Warburg, were made physically afraid. I still come across students in their twenties who were terrified by their initial reading.

The original title of the novel was The Last Man in Europe, as if to summarise the utter loneliness and despair of Winston Smith, but it was a stroke of genius that changed this into the almost hieroglyphic title—often rendered in numbers rather than in Orwell's words—that we know today. No more than an inversion of the year 1948 in which it was being completed, the date gave an immediacy and urgency to the menace of totalitarian rule. This time, no outright attempt at censorship was undertaken. Instead, there were efforts to make the novel into something that it was not. The Book-of-the-Month Club in the United States, for example, asked that the passages of Emmanuel Goldstein's "Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" be dropped—because they, too, were too "Trotskyist" as well as too dense. Orwell declined this demand, at the risk of losing a highly lucrative promotion. He also issued a written statement repudiating those who interpreted or conscripted the novel as an attack on the socialist movement in general. Having known continuous neglect and suppression because of his principles, he was to experience a final, closing moment of literary success partly because of those who wished to use his principles against him. Having set 1984 in England, in order, as he put it, to show that the English were no better than anyone else and that the totalitarian danger existed everywhere, he was in a strong position to appreciate the irony of this exploitation. A later CIA-sponsored cartoon-film of Animal Farm, produced for purposes of Cold War propaganda, cut out the closing passage about the restoration of Farmer Jones as head of the farm. That chapter just did not, for immediate practical purposes, quite "fit" the needs of the Agency. This makes the same point in a slightly different way.

Despite being set in England, the book is obviously drawn from Orwell's literary knowledge of Russia and of the Soviet Union. The manipulation of numbers by the authorities (most famously the Party's ability to insist that Two and Two can if necessary make Five) is anticipated in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. And Evgeny Zamyatin's We, an early dystopian fantasy written in the early years of Communism, was among Orwell's acknowledged inspirations. During the hideous period of Stalin's "Five Year Plan," it was at one point claimed by the authorities that the goal of the plan had been attained early, in two heroic two-year spurts. This huge lie was sometimes rendered for the stupider believers as 2 + 2 = 5.