Animal Farm

Orwell’s allegory parallels the events of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Many characters and events suggest real-life counterparts. Napoleon is a stand-in for Stalin, while Snowball, the idealistic pig whom Napoleon overthrows, is an analog for Leon Trotsky, who was essentially the second-in-command of the first head of Soviet Russia’s government, Vladimir Lenin. The old boar Major is a Karl Marx-like figure who inspires revolution. Mr. Jones represents the Russian Czar Nicholas II, whose mismanaged leadership led to the communist takeover. The farm dogs represent the brutal Soviet police, and the sheep represent the ignorant and unthinking masses. Neighboring human-run farms symbolize capitalist countries that either desired the downfall of the Soviet Union or sought to form alliances with it. As in the Soviet Union under Stalin, life on the farm includes show trials and executions, deceptive propaganda, and revisionist history.

Thinkers, including early 20th-century English writer G. K. Chesterton, have pointed out that the word “revolution” (literally, overturning) implies that the wheel of change will eventually turn back to its original position. Orwell plays on this pessimistic idea in Animal Farm. The revolution initially carried out by the animals brings about the original situation: humans in charge. The only difference is that the farm is even more corrupt than it was before—the ruling class consists of morally compromised pigs and humans who have little regard for the rights of the ruled.

This trajectory parallels that of the Soviet Union, which began with the noble ideals of equality and justice but almost immediately descended into tyranny under Lenin, and then even more brutal tyranny under Stalin. The ostensible goal of the 1917 Russian Revolution was to replace corrupt and inept czarist rule with an egalitarian socialist society. It aimed to improve the lives of peasants and industrial workers. The Soviet Famine of 1932-33 made clear the extent to which this effort failed: Millions of people starved to death because of Stalin’s policies of forced collectivization and class warfare.

Stalin’s regime also prominently featured the paranoid persecution of ideological enemies that contradicted communism’s professed belief in justice and equality. Animal Farm reflects this feature of Stalin’s rule in the mass executions carried out by Napoleon and his henchmen.

Communist Party members ensured they were a protected and privileged class, as famously illustrated in the pigs’ cooption of the farm’s commandments into one ominous motto: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (96). This satirizes the communist state of the Soviet Union: stratifying ostensible peers into a hierarchy (some animals take precedence over others), warping the meaning of language (the adjective “equal” cannot logically have a comparative form like “more equal”), and a collective eradication of history and memory (seven commandments turned into one without debate or documentation).

Orwell wrote Animal Farm during World War II when the Soviet Union joined the Allied powers to fight Nazi fascism. Orwell believed the Soviet Union’s ally status made many Westerners ignorant of the corruption of its regime. As a committed socialist, Orwell saw Stalin’s dictatorship as a betrayal of true socialist principles. Thus, Orwell hoped that Animal Farm would help destroy “the Soviet myth” and open people’s eyes to the dangers of totalitarianism in the postwar world (x).