"Those old enough to remember the wartime spirit of the 1940s may be startled to realize that Orwell started work on Animal Farm in 1943. As he discovered when he went looking for a publisher, Stalin's Soviet Union was so popular that year in Britain and America that few wanted to hear or read anything critical of it. It was as though a great deal of the West had willingly put on blinders, and this was because the Red Army that year had fought the Nazis to a standstill and forced them to retreat. Suddenly Hitler's army, which had looked invincible for so long, had begun to look vincible. ... It was not until the war had ended that Fredric Warburg finally published it, on August 17, 1945."
Animal Farm Preface by Russell Baker

Fredric Warburg was the British publisher who printed George Orwell's ''Animal Farm'' when other publishers rejected it on the ground that it might annoy the Soviet Union, Britain's then wartime ally.