El País has an interesting article which describes what circumstances led George Orwell to write his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It was during the Spanish Civil War.
💬 Orwell arrived in Spain full of revolutionary optimism, but the atmosphere of terror that he experienced in Barcelona in May 1937 is what he later conveyed in 1984.
The specific moment that George Orwell witnessed firsthand was when the Kremlin-led communists revolted against their anarchist allies in Barcelona, leaving a thousand dead.
Orwell was not surprised by the tensions between the various political groups, but the calculated telling of lies by the Kremlin-led communists did surprise him.
One of those lies was that the Kremlin communists had managed to “dismantle” a network of anarchist traitors who had cooperated with the Fascists to assassinate Republican leaders.
Full article: 1984: How George Orwell’s Big Brother was born during the Spanish Civil War
Writer Updated 