Animal Farm: Pigs and History

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is the most crucial allegorical novella ever written. It approaches the events, conditions, and massive disappointments of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The story starts with the oppressed animals of Manor Farm; a wise and elderly pig named Old Major (a character who is supposed to be a combination of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin) tells the other animals of a dream he has. All animals can live together in harmony, but they need to rebel against their oppressive owners, such as Mr. Jones (Tsar Nicholas II), who owns Manor Farm. Three pigs named Napoleon (Joseph Stalin), Snowball (Leon Trotsky), and Squealer (Soviet propaganda) adopt the principles into an ideology called Animalism (Marxism). After successfully overthrowing their oppressor by chasing Mr. Jones off the farm, the animals begin the task of building their four-legged utopia in the vision of Old Major. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the animals have achieved liberty, equality, and collective well-being—no more hunger and abuse from their old oppressor, the tyrannical Mr. Jones.

Snowball teaches his comrades how to read, and Napoleon works with puppies and indoctrinates them with the principles of Animalism. When Mr. Jones reappears with other men to take back the farm, the animals again manage to defeat him in what will later be known as the battle of Cowshed (Russian Civil War). After this achievement, conditions begin to decline amid the intensifying feud between Napoleon and Snowball. They have different ideas over the future direction of Animal Farm. Snowball wants to see an electric generating mill for the farm, and Napoleon disagrees. Snowball argues his position with great intelligence and oratory skills at the meeting to vote on whether there should be a mill or not. Napoleon responds by unleashing his dogs on Snowball, forcing him to flee from the farm. The power struggle is over, and Napoleon has seized absolute control over Animal Farm. He sets up a bureaucratic regime where the pigs are the only ones capable of making decisions. He orders the building of the mill, reversing his prior stance on it. The mill was not constructed durably enough and fell over during a storm. Napoleon blames it on a conspiracy; Snowball and his followers are responsible for the damaged mill. Purges occur, and his dogs kill anyone who isn’t unquestionably loyal to Napoleon. According to the propaganda told by Squealer and directed by Napoleon, everything wrong with Animal Farm is the fault of the exiled Snowball.

Meanwhile, Napoleon becomes more vicious and ruthless. He has stolen the revolution and becomes more oppressive than their old ruler Mr. Jones, who many of the animals bravely fought. Napoleon lives in the old house of Mr. Jones, drinking whisky and sleeping in his bed. He has separated himself from his “equals,” who suffer significantly because of their new despot. A neighboring farmer named Mr. Frederick (Nazi Germany) betrays the trust of Napoleon on the purchase of timber and invades the farm and blows up the costly windmill with dynamite. The animals suffer significantly fighting off Mr. Frederick and the farmers (World War II). The horse Boxer, the devoutly loyal and hardest-working animal, is poorly wounded in battle and cannot continue rebuilding the windmill. The animals are told in a propagandized way by Squealer that Boxer died peacefully at a hospital and in full support of the cause at Animal Farm. Boxer was instead sold to a glue maker by Napoleon to pay for more whisky. Napoleon and the pigs continue oppressing the other animals. The one commandment left out of the previous seven is, “all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The pigs have aligned themselves with Mr. Pilkington and the other human farmers against the working class, both human and animal. The name of the farm changes back to Manor Farm because Napoleon orders that this is the “correct” name. The common animals see no difference between the humans and pigs who decimated their revolutionary hopes.

Orwell flawlessly described the disaster that the Russian Revolution of 1917 would become in his nightmarish allegorical tale. Karl Marx’s ideas of revolutionary socialism inspired hope for the oppressed and downtrodden laborers of the globe. “Workers of the world, unite!” A leading figure of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, more commonly called Lenin, and his followers carried these ideas out. Among his followers were Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. Trotsky was much more popular and often thought of as the logical successor to Lenin after he died in 1924. He was charming, charismatic, intellectual, a brilliant orator, and mostly an autodidact. One of the great tragedies of the 20th century for the Russian people is that Trotsky allowed Stalin, a bureaucratic party hack with little prestige, to use subtle allegiances in government to seize power and exile Trotsky in February of 1929. Trotsky’s fate ended brutally, an ice pick wielded by one of Stalin’s henchmen striking a fatal blow to his head in his home in Mexico City in 1940. Stalin was responsible for systematic purges of the most terrorizing and murderous kind against Soviet party members and many other Russians (1936–1940). Stalin also hideously mishandled the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939, enabling Hitler’s war machine to inflict the highest number of wartime casualties the world had ever seen (roughly 25 million people) in 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The exact number is unclear, but a rough estimate of an additional 20 million people died, attributable to Stalin’s reign. Major Soviet Paper Says 20 Million Died As Victims of Stalin The catastrophic misery because Stalin seized control of the Soviet Union after the Revolution and Civil War cannot be understated.

Orwell volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) on the side of the socialist government against Francisco Franco and the fascists. He described it beautifully in his nonfiction book Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was part of a left-wing opposition militia with many Trotskyist sympathizers. After that trying experience, he was still firm in his belief that democracies must defeat fascism and Nazism at all costs. But it also solidified his belief that Stalin’s totalitarianism was a menace of a terrifying nature also required defeat. He witnessed the Soviet Union undermine what that could have been in Spain, resulting in the victory of fascist Franco, backed by the Nazis and the Catholic Church. His brilliant final book Nineteen Eighty-Four is a horrifyingly realistic dystopian warning to resist totalitarianism with every breath in one’s being. (Nineteen Eighty-Four will be analyzed much more thoroughly in a future blog post.) Orwell said in Why I Write, “I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.” The power to break down our biases and see truths for what they are is something we can take away from Orwell.