In 1938 came Martin's refusal to publish George Orwell's celebrated dispatches from Barcelona during the Spanish civil war because they criticised the communists for suppressing the anarchists and the left-wing Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). "It is an unfortunate fact", Martin wrote to Orwell, "that any hostile criticism of the present Russian regime is liable to be taken as propaganda "against socialism"". Martin also refused to allow any of the magazine's writers to review Leon Trotsky's anti-Stalinist book "The Revolution Betrayed".