Animal Farm: Context and the Russian Revolution

Animal Farm is an allegory. An allegory is a story whose characters and events stand for real people and ideas.

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"

George Orwell

Who Orwell was and why he wrote it

• George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) was a committed democratic socialist who believed in equality but hated dictatorship. Animal Farm attacks the way Stalin betrayed the Russian Revolution; it is not an attack on socialism itself.
• He wrote it over the winter of 1943-44, when Britain and the Soviet Union were wartime allies, so several publishers turned it down before it appeared in 1945.
• Fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he had watched revolutionary groups turn on one another, which taught him how revolutions devour their own.
• He wants readers to think about the gap between fine words and cruel deeds: the pigs keep promising that "all animals are equal" while taking everything for themselves.
• He gave it the playful subtitle "A Fairy Story"; later editions, starting in America in 1946, dropped it, so the book is now known simply as Animal Farm.

The historical figures behind the animals

• Old Major stands for Karl Marx and Lenin, the thinkers whose ideas inspired the revolution.
• Snowball stands for Leon Trotsky, the clever rival driven into exile.
• Napoleon stands for Joseph Stalin, who seizes total power.
• Squealer stands for the state propaganda machine and the controlled press.
• The dogs stand for Stalin's secret police.
• Boxer stands for the loyal working class, worked to exhaustion and then betrayed.
• The sheep stand for the masses who simply repeat whatever they are told.
• Moses the raven stands for the Church, offering a heaven ("Sugarcandy Mountain") that keeps people content with hardship.
• Mr Jones stands for Tsar Nicholas II, overthrown in 1917.
• The neighbours Frederick and Pilkington stand for Hitler's Germany and the Western powers, Britain and the United States.

The events that mirror history

• The Rebellion that drives out Jones mirrors the 1917 Russian Revolution that overthrew the Tsar.
• The Battle of the Cowshed mirrors the Russian Civil War, when foreign armies tried to crush the new Soviet state.
• The animals' exhausting work on the windmill mirrors Stalin's Five-Year Plans, the drive to industrialise Russia - achieved, but at huge cost to the ordinary workers who built it.
• The forced confessions and executions mirror Stalin's "show trials" and purges of the 1930s, where people confessed to invented crimes before being killed.
• Frederick's forged banknotes and surprise attack mirror the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact and Hitler's betrayal of it when Germany invaded in 1941.
• The pigs ending up "more equal than others" mirrors a new ruling class becoming just as privileged as the old one it replaced.

Allegory, fable and Orwell's warning

• A fable is a short story that teaches a moral lesson, usually through animals. Animal Farm is both a fable and an allegory. It is a simple animal tale carrying a serious political meaning.
• Telling it through animals makes a serious political attack feel simple and clear, and lets the reader see the cruelty from the victims' side.
• His central warning is that power corrupts: those who seize it in the name of equality can become as tyrannical as the rulers they replaced.
• He also shows how language is used to control - rewriting history, renaming events, and shrinking all thought to a slogan like "Four legs good, two legs bad" - the idea he develops further in Nineteen Eighty-Four.