George Orwell was the pen name of
Eric Blair, a British political novelist and essayist whose pointed
criticisms of political oppression propelled him into prominence
toward the middle of the twentieth century. Born in 1903 to
British colonists in Bengal, India, Orwell received his education
at a series of private schools, including Eton, an elite school
in England. His painful experiences with snobbishness and social
elitism at Eton, as well as his intimate familiarity with the reality
of British imperialism in India, made him deeply suspicious of the
entrenched class system in English society. As a young man, Orwell
became a socialist, speaking openly against the excesses of governments
east and west and fighting briefly for the socialist cause during
the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939.
Unlike many British socialists in the 1930s
and 1940s, Orwell was not enamored of the
Soviet Union and its policies, nor did he consider the Soviet Union
a positive representation of the possibilities of socialist society.
He could not turn a blind eye to the cruelties and hypocrisies of
Soviet Communist Party, which had overturned the semifeudal system
of the tsars only to replace it with the dictatorial reign of Joseph
Stalin. Orwell became a sharp critic of both capitalism and communism,
and is remembered chiefly as an advocate of freedom and a committed
opponent of communist oppression. His two greatest anti-totalitarian
novels—Animal Farm and 1984—form
the basis of his reputation. Orwell died in 1950, only
a year after completing 1984, which many consider
his masterpiece.
A dystopian novel, 1984 attacks the idea
of totalitarian communism (a political system in which one ruling
party plans and controls the collective social action of a state)
by painting a terrifying picture of a world in which personal freedom
is nonexistent. Animal Farm, written in 1945, deals
with similar themes but in a shorter and somewhat simpler format.
A “fairy story” in the style of Aesop’s fables, it uses animals
on an English farm to tell the history of Soviet communism. Certain
animals are based directly on Communist Party leaders: the pigs
Napoleon and Snowball, for example, are figurations of Joseph Stalin
and Leon Trotsky, respectively. Orwell uses the form of the fable
for a number of aesthetic and political reasons. To better understand
these, it is helpful to know at least the rudiments of Soviet history
under Communist Party rule, beginning with the October Revolution
of 1917.
In February 1917, Tsar Nicholas
II, the monarch of Russia, abdicated and the socialist Alexander
Kerensky became premier. At the end of October (November 7 on
current calendars), Kerensky was ousted, and Vladimir Lenin, the
architect of the Russian Revolution, became chief commissar. Almost
immediately, as wars raged on virtually every Russian front, Lenin’s
chief allies began jockeying for power in the newly formed state;
the most influential included Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Gregory
Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev. Trotsky and Stalin emerged as the most
likely heirs to Lenin’s vast power. Trotsky was a popular and charismatic
leader, famous for his impassioned speeches, while the taciturn
Stalin preferred to consolidate his power behind the scenes. After
Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin orchestrated
an alliance against Trotsky that included himself, Zinoviev, and
Kaminev. In the following years, Stalin succeeded in becoming the
unquestioned dictator of the Soviet Union and had Trotsky expelled
first from Moscow, then from the Communist Party, and finally from
Russia altogether in 1936. Trotsky fled to Mexico,
where he was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in 1940.
In 1934, Stalin’s ally Serge Kirov
was assassinated in Leningrad, prompting Stalin to commence his
infamous purges of the Communist Party. Holding “show trials”—trials
whose outcomes he and his allies had already decided—Stalin had
his opponents officially denounced as participants in Trotskyist
or anti-Stalinist conspiracies and therefore as “enemies of the
people,” an appellation that guaranteed their immediate execution.
As the Soviet government’s economic planning faltered and failed,
Russia suffered under a surge of violence, fear, and starvation.
Stalin used his former opponent as a tool to placate the wretched
populace. Trotsky became a common national enemy and thus a source
of negative unity. He was a frightening specter used to conjure
horrifying eventualities, in comparison with which the current misery
paled. Additionally, by associating his enemies with Trotsky’s
name, Stalin could ensure their immediate and automatic elimination
from the Communist Party.
These and many other developments in Soviet history before 1945 have
direct parallels in Animal Farm: Napoleon ousts
Snowball from the farm and, after the windmill collapses, uses Snowball in
his purges just as Stalin used Trotsky. Similarly, Napoleon becomes
a dictator, while Snowball is never heard from again. Orwell was
inspired to write Animal Farm in part by his experiences in
a Trotskyist group during the Spanish Civil War, and Snowball certainly
receives a more sympathetic portrayal than Napoleon. But though Animal
Farm was written as an attack on a specific government,
its general themes of oppression, suffering, and injustice have far
broader application; modern readers have come to see Orwell’s book
as a powerful attack on any political, rhetorical, or military power
that seeks to control human beings unjustly.
Historical Context
Russian society in the early twentieth century was bipolar:
a tiny minority controlled most of the country’s wealth, while the
vast majority of the country’s inhabitants were impoverished and oppressed
peasants. Communism arose in Russia when the nation’s workers and
peasants, assisted by a class of concerned intellectuals known as
the intelligentsia, rebelled against and overwhelmed the wealthy
and powerful class of capitalists and aristocrats. They hoped to
establish a socialist utopia based on the principles of the German
economic and political philosopher Karl Marx.
In Das Kapital (Capital), Marx advanced
an economically deterministic interpretation of human history, arguing
that society would naturally evolve—from a monarchy and aristocracy,
to capitalism, and then on to communism, a system under which all
property would be held in common. The dignity of the poor workers oppressed
by capitalism would be restored, and all people would live as equals.
Marx followed this sober and scholarly work with The Communist
Manifesto, an impassioned call to action that urged, “Workers
of the world, unite!”
In the Russia of 1917, it appeared
that Marx’s dreams were to become reality. After a politically complicated
civil war, Tsar Nicholas II, the monarch of Russia, was forced to
abdicate the throne that his family had held for three centuries.
Vladimir Ilych Lenin, a Russian intellectual revolutionary, seized
power in the name of the Communist Party. The new regime took land
and industry from private control and put them under government
supervision. This centralization of economic systems constituted
the first steps in restoring Russia to the prosperity it had known
before World War I and in modernizing the nation’s primitive infrastructure,
including bringing electricity to the countryside. After Lenin died
in 1924, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky jockeyed
for control of the newly formed Soviet Union. Stalin, a crafty and
manipulative politician, soon banished Trotsky, an idealistic proponent
of international communism. Stalin then began to consolidate
his power with brutal intensity, killing or imprisoning his perceived
political enemies and overseeing the purge of approximately twenty
million Soviet citizens.
