For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do.

This judgement strikes me as being simultaneously true and beautiful. Orwell was physically brave in Spain, but not heroically so. He did no more than countless other volunteer soldiers, and suffered very much less than many of them. But when he was put to the test, and stumbled across an important chunk of evidence, he had to confront the strong pressure either to lie or to keep silent. Here again, he was exceptional rather than exemplary. He simply resolved that he would tell the truth as he saw it, and would stipulate that he had only the vantage point of a bewildered and occasionally frightened but none the less determined individual. He repeatedly enjoins the reader, in effect, not to take him upon trust:

It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eye-witnesses whom I believe to be reliable.

In this properly provisional verdict, however, he unknowingly erred on the side of pessimism. The history of the May events in Barcelona in 1937 was certainly buried for years under a slag-heap of slander and falsification. Orwell, indeed, derived his terrifying notion of the memory-hole and the rewritten past, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, from exactly this single instance of the abolished memory. ‘This kind of thing is frightening to me,’ he wrote about Catalonia, ‘because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world’:

After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history… The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.

But in our very immediate past, documents have surfaced to show that his vulgar, empirical, personal, commonsensical deposition was verifiable after all. The recent opening of Communist records in Moscow, and also of closely held Franco-era documentation in Madrid and Salamanca, has provided a posthumous vindication.

The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937. Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) upon arriving in Spain. Allowing as he did for the bias that this lent to his first-hand observations, he none the less became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow. The outright and evidently concerted fabrications that immediately followed in the press, which convinced or neutralized so many ‘progressive intellectuals’, only persuaded him the more that he had watched a lie being gestated and then born.

Well, now we have the papers of the Soviet Military Archive in Moscow, formally known as the State Military Archive. ‘Document Forty-Two’, in the series dealing with Spain, provides us with the text of a lengthy unsigned report, delivered on 15 April 1937, and forwarded by Georgi Dimitrov to Marshal Voroshilov. The importance of the traffic is emphasized by this very routing: unimportant messages did not go from the head of the Comintern to the chief of the Red Army and thus almost certainly to Stalin himself. (The actual author may well have been André Marty, the French-born Comintern agent for Spain, memorably etched in at least some of his cold hatefulness by Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls.)

In robotic prose, the author characterizes the non-Communist left in the Spanish Republic and specifically Catalonia as ‘fascists or semi-fascists’. He goes on to describe the position of Moscow as ‘absolutely correct on every question’. This slavish stuff might be called routine, but just after a paean to the ‘natural and indisputable’ inevitability of a Communist Party victory, the writer of the report comes to the point. A crisis may be objectively brewing, given the staunchly anti-Russian positions taken by Largo Caballero and his Republican cabinet, but it may still need some subjective assistance. In fact, the duty of the Party involves ‘not waiting passively for a “natural” unleashing of the hidden government crisis, but to hasten it and, if necessary, to provoke it’. The date of this proposal, which also announces that ‘the Party is waiting for your advice on this question’, anticipates the Communist police attack on the Barcelona telephone exchange by a matter of just over two weeks.

The succeeding paper, ‘Document Forty-Three’, was written on 11 May and is the first report back to the Comintern on the mixed results of the action. Regretting the extent to which the POUM and other forces had been able to resist the Stalinist onslaught, the author (whose identity in this instance is uncertain) relays the demand for ‘energetic and merciless repression’ by means of a ‘military tribunal for the Trotskyists’.* There is no need for guesswork about the meaning of this; Professor Peter Davison’s work on Orwell has already established that a Catalan version of the Moscow show-trials was in preparation, and that George Orwell and his wife Eileen would have been in the dock – an NKVD file unearthed in Moscow and dated 13 July 1937 describes them as ‘pronounced Trotskyists’ – had they not managed to slip across the border into France. As it was, many of their English comrades were imprisoned and vilely ill-used, and Andrés Nin, the leader of the POUM, was kidnapped by Stalin’s agents and tortured to death. With each succeeding disclosure from the records of the period, it becomes clearer that Orwell’s free-hand sketch of events was a journalistic understatement.

‘Part of his malaise’, wrote Jennie Lee, who saw Orwell in those terrible days, ‘was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.’ Ms Lee went on to become the wife of Aneurin Bevan, who was also Orwell’s editor and patron at Tribune.