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George Orwell wrote his l945 masterpiece, “Animal Farm”, to expose what he called “the Soviet myth”. Orwell angered many of his friends on the left with his allegorical novel about Stalin and the Russian Revolution.

But “Animal Farm” was an instant classic with an unexpected group of readers — Ukrainian refugees from the Soviet Union. One of them was Vitalij Keis.

When Keis was a kid, he spent six years in a Displaced Persons camp for Ukrainians right after World War II. The camp was on a former military base in West Germany.

One day, his teacher recommended a brand new book by the British writer George Orwell. It was “Animal Farm.”

“This was in Ukrainian, not in English,” Keis said.

He had picked up translation of Orwell’s novel at the camp commissary. Several thousand copies had been printed by hand at another Ukrainian DP camp.

“From what I understand, it was the first translation,” he said, in any foreign language. It was l947. Keis vaguely remembers discussing the book with his mother, who read it too.

“You have to remember, this was many years ago. I’m 76 now. But definitely this book made a splash.”

In fact, Animal Farm was required reading in some DP camps.

The First Orwell Fans

After the war, there were nearly three million Ukrainian refugees in western Europe. Most, like Keis’ family, came from the Soviet Union.

“I would say we were the first Orwell fans,” he said, laughing.

Because Orwell’s story described what they’d lived through — from the idealism of the Russian Revolution to Stalin’s forced collectivization, famine, and mass arrests.

“This was right after World War II, and was very fresh in memory,” Keis said. “My family, one fifth of my family was exiled to Siberia, and we never found any trace of them.”

Andrea Chalupa is Vitalij Keis’ niece. She’s also the author of a new e-book, “Orwell and the Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm.”

She said a young Ukrainian scholar named Ihor Shevchenko wrote to Orwell in l946, after reading “Animal Farm” in English. According to Chalupa, he wrote that he’d love to translate the novel.

“The message of your book resonates with me and I translated it out loud to Ukrainian refugees here, and they love it, and we want to make copies and give it out to people.”

Orwell was delighted. He refused any royalties, and even agreed to write a preface for the Ukrainian edition, and it remains the most detailed and personal description of how he came to write the book that made him world famous.

“I am aware that I write for readers about whom I know nothing, but also that they too have probably never had the slightest opportunity to know anything about me,” Orwell began.

“He basically said, please let me introduce myself and humbly tell you how I feel about your government and the events that you recognize in Animal Farm,” Chalupa said.

Orwell told his Ukrainian readers that he was a Socialist, more out of sympathy for the plight of the working poor than out of any theoretical fondness for a centrally planned economy.

He then explained how in l936, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went to fight with the Communists against the Fascists. He didn’t realize there were warring factions among the Communists, and that he had, more or less by accident, joined the Communist militia that wasn’t controlled by Moscow.

“And he goes on to tell the story in the preface of being in Spain on the frontlines, of almost being killed, of being with his wife and running for their lives from the Stalinists, and how that opened his eyes for the first time to the horror of Stalin,” Chalupa said. “On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages.”

Orwell said he wrote “Animal Farm” so that people in Western Europe would see the Soviet regime for what it really was.

“In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated,” Orwell wrote in the preface.

“So Orwell was moved to say that’s not socialism everybody, stop just blindly supporting it. The Russian Revolution, that spirit is over, it’s dead. Stalin’s killed it,” said Chalupa.

In l945, Stalin demanded the repatriation of all Soviet citizens in western Europe. Most of the Ukrainian refugees were rounded up from DP camps, and sent back to the Soviet Union, with help from the British and American authorities.

Vitalij Keis’s family escaped repatriation. They moved to the United States in l951, when Keis was a teenager. He later became a professor of comparative literature and writing at Rutgers University.

A couple of years ago, Keis’ niece Andrea came over for dinner. Even though she’d been working on a project about Ukrainian and Soviet history, she’d only just learned about the Ukrainian edition of “Animal Farm”.

“And over dinner, which was of course borscht and vareniky and stuffed cabbage,” Chalupa said, “I was telling them what I’d been up to, and about Orwell and the refugees and “Animal Farm”. And my uncle just looks at me and says, “Oh yeah, I have a copy of that book.”

It was his copy of “Animal Farm” from the DP camp. He’d kept it all these years.

He then gave it to his niece as a gift.

Andrea Chalupa keeps it in a glass case at her parents’ house. The cover shows large, menacing pig learning against a fence, clutching a whip. Boxer, the story’s long-suffering workhorse, is in the background, pulling a heavy wagon up a hill.

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Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm
by George Orwell
March 1947

I have been asked to write a preface to the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm. I am aware that I write for readers about whom I know nothing, but also that they too have probably never had the slightest opportunity to know anything about me.

In this preface they will most likely expect me to say something of how Animal Farm originated but first I would like to say something about myself and the experiences by which I arrived at my political position.

I was born in India in 1903. My father was an official in the English administration there, and my family was one of those ordinary middle-class families of soldiers, clergymen, government officials, teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc. I was educated at Eton, the most costly and snobbish of the English Public Schools.* But I had only got in there by means of a scholarship; otherwise my father could not have afforded to send me to a school of this type.

Shortly after I left school (I wasn’t quite twenty years old then) I went to Burma and joined the Indian Imperial Police. This was an armed police, a sort of gendarmerie very similar to the Spanish Guardia Civil or the Garde Mobile in France. I stayed five years in the service. It did not suit me and made me hate imperialism, although at that time nationalist feelings in Burma were not very marked, and relations between the English and the Burmese were not particularly unfriendly. When on leave in England in 1927, I resigned from the service and decided to become a writer: at tirst without any especial success. In 1928—9 I lived in Paris and wrote short stories and novels that nobody would print (I have since destroyed them all). In the following years I lived mostly from hand to mouth, and went hungry on several occasions. It was only from 1934 onwards that I was able to live on what I earned from my writing. In the meantime I sometimes lived for months on end amongst the poor and half-criminal elements who inhabit the worst parts of the poorer quarters, or take to the streets, begging and stealing. At that time I associated with them through lack of money, but later their way of life interested me very much for its own sake. I spent many months (more systematically this time) studying the conditions of the miners in the north of England. Up to 19301 did not on the whole look upon myself as a Socialist. In fact I had as yet no clearly defined political views. I became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society. Continue Reading >>