Yeah publishers didn't want to accept it, one was going to but then rescinded after discussing with the Ministry of Information. Secker and Warburg, an anti-fascist and anti-communist publisher, chose to publish it eventually once attitudes towards the Soviets shifted.
Secker and Warburg went on to become Harvill Secker and then was bought out by and became an imprint of Penguin Books. And what do you know?
The book Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War details how as well as holding sway over the BBC it (the Foreign Office's Information Research Department) also approached, funded, and essentially ran publishing companies as outlets for propaganda: >“This program began with the identifying and recruiting of suitable authors and independent publishers deemed trustworthy and politically sympathetic” (Barnhisel, Turner 113). Their relationship with Penguin >books is a famous “example of (…) the organization attempting to recruit commercial publishers for the purpose of ‘grey’ propaganda” (Barnhisel, Turner 113)
Also:
Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the United Kingdom was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and the British intelligentsia held Stalin in >high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated
Yeah publishers didn't want to accept it, one was going to but then rescinded after discussing with the Ministry of Information. Secker and Warburg, an anti-fascist and anti-communist publisher, chose to publish it eventually once attitudes towards the Soviets shifted.
Secker and Warburg went on to become Harvill Secker and then was bought out by and became an imprint of Penguin Books. And what do you know?
Also:
seething