Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, is at the surface a simple novel of a group of animals living and working under the oppression of a tyrannical farmer who successfully overthrow him with a plan to live independently which backfires on them and ends them up under the even more dictatorial rule of the pigs. The novel, though, was actually meant by Orwell to be a satire of Russia during its revolutionary period from the Czar Nicholas II to Trotsky and Stalin. “Animal Farm,” wrote Orwell, “was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” Through this essay, the social and political situation presented in George Orwell’s Animal Farm will thoroughly be discussed and described.

The Russian Revolution began with the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in 1917. The Government was then taken over in the absence of the Czar by a group of bankers, lawyers, industrialists and capitalists. This group was a very weak leadership and didn’t last for long. A political party known as the Bolsheviks, headed by V. I. Lenin, stepped in to take over. The main goal of the B

Farmer Jones is Czar Nicholas II, Overthrown by the revolution and later executed by the Bolsheviks; Old Major is Marx and perhaps Marxist-Leninism; Boxer and Clover represent the proletariat (the urban industrial worker)–and more remotely the Chinese revolutionaries of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion; Napoleon stands for Joseph Stalin; Snowball is Leon Trotsky; Mollie is at heart a White Russian with little sympathy for Bolshevik aims; the raven Moses stands for the Russian Orthodox church and to a lesser extent the Roman Catholic church, which at one time Stalin imagined he could reach an accord; Squealer is Pravda, official organ of the Communist party in the Soviet Union, and the pigs in general represent the party; Farmer Pilkington stands for Churchillian England, while Farmer Frederick is Hitler Germany; the animal uprising is the 1917 Revolution (actually two revolutions); the so-called battles of the Cowshed and the Windmill are, respectively, the early Western Military intervention in support of White Russian resistance to the Bolsheviks and the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union by German forces; the building of the windmill corresponds to Stalin’s various five-year plans for rapid industrialization (although similar plans were also instituted in Hitler Germany); Jones’s farmhouse becomes the Kremlin, seat of the Soviet government; the slaughter by Napoleon’s dogs of fellow animals supposedly working for Snowball-Trotsky are the bloody Moscow purge trials, mainly of the 1930's; Stalin’s dealings with the treacherous Frederick recalls the nonaggression pact between Hitler Germany and the Soviet Union; and the continued drudgery imposed on the worker animals is likened to Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization. (Smyer 13-14)

After adopting Trotsky’s philosophies and integrating them into his own, Stalin had Trotsky exiled to prevent him from taking over. By 1941, Russia under Stalin’s rule was in a worse condition than before their plan for the betterment of quality of life for the whole had begun.

Although the parallels are many, the overall plot and moral can also be seen and understood separately from its historical context. For the reader without a basic knowledge history, the story can be seen as a fable pointing out society’s inability to govern itself, or at an even more juvenile level, may even be seen as a children’s story, one of a group of animals that pull together to get their freedom from the mean old farmer.

Some topics in this essay:
Manor Farm, Truth” Stalin, Soviet Union, Farmer Jones, Animal Farm, Clover Benjamin, Nicholas II, George Orwell, Germany Jones’s, Trotsky Stalin, animal farm, soviet union, hitler germany, czar nicholas, czar nicholas ii, nicholas ii, society’s inability govern, collective farms, farm animal, animals equal, superior intelligence, 220000000 puds, 220000000 puds seed,