A memorandum from the archives of the KGB (then known as the NKVD), dated 13 July 1937, describes him and Eileen O’Shaughnessy as ‘pronounced Trotskyites’ operating with clandestine credentials. It also asserts, with the usual tinge of surreal fantasy, that the couple maintained contact with opposition circles in Moscow. This accusation would have been no joke in the hands of an interrogator, even though Orwell makes the least of it in Homage to Catalonia. ‘I was not guilty of any definite act,’ he wrote, ‘but I was guilty of “Trotskyism”.
