George Orwell wrote the manuscript between November 1943 and February 1944 after his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in "Homage to Catalonia" (1938). In the preface of a 1947 Ukrainian edition of "Animal Farm", he explained how escaping the communist purges in Spain taught him "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries." This motivated Orwell to expose and strongly condemn what he saw as the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals. "Homage to Catalonia" sold poorly; after seeing Arthur Koestler's best-selling, "Darkness at Noon," about the Moscow Trials, Orwell decided that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism.