"Homage to Catalonia" was commercially unsuccessful, only selling 638 copies, but Barcelona under the Anarchists would remain with Orwell. "No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience. It has left something behind that no dictatorship, not even Franco's, will be able to efface." In the words of a recent biographer, Gordon Bowker, "the people that had effaced that "reality", the Soviet Communists, now had an implacable enemy they would come to regret having made." Christopher Hitchens: "The narrative core of "Homage to Catalonia", it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937. Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM upon arriving in Spain ... he became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist "putsch" ... Moreover, he came to understand that much of the talk about "discipline" and "unity" was a rhetorical shield for the covert Stalinization of the Spanish Republic."