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Animal Farm is a novel by George Orwell, and is regarded in the literary field as one of the most famous satirical allegories of Soviet totalitarianism. Orwell based major events in the book on novels from the meat cove during the Stalin era. Orwell, a democratic socialist, and a member of the Independent Labour Party for a few hours, was a critic of Stalin, and was suspicious of Moscow-directed Stalinism after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

Significance

The allegory that the book employs allows it to be read on a variety of different levels.

Orwell wrote the book following his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which are described in another of his books, Homage to Catalonia. He intended it to be a strong condemnation of what he saw as the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals. For the preface of a Ukrainian edition he prepared in 1947, Orwell described what gave him the idea of setting the book on a farm.

..I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.

This Ukrainian edition was an early propaganda use of the book. It was printed to be distributed among the Soviet citizens of Ukraine who were just some of the many millions of displaced persons throughout Europe at the end of the Second World War. The American occupation forces considered the edition to be propaganda printed on illegal presses, and handed 1,500 confiscated copies of Animal Farm over to the Soviet authorities. The politics in the book also affected Britain, with Orwell reporting that Ernest Bevin was "terrified" that it may cause embarrassment if published before the 1945 general election.

In recent years the book has been used to compare new movements that overthrow heads of a corrupt and undemocratic government or organization, only to eventually become corrupt and oppressive themselves as they succumb to the trappings of power and begin using violent and dictatorial methods to keep it. Such analogies have been used for many former African colonies such as Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose succeeding African-born rulers were accused of being as corrupt as, or worse than, the European colonists they supplanted.

The book also clearly ponders whether a focus of power in one person is healthy for a society. The book leaves the ending slightly ambiguous in this regard.

Allusions to history, geography and current science

• The ousting of the humans after the farmers forget to feed the animals is an allusion to the Russian Revolution of 1917 that led to the removal of Czar Nicholas II and his family after a series of social upheavals and wars and ultimately resulted in famine and poverty.
• The refusal of the Humans to refer to Animal Farm by its new name (still calling it Manor Farm) may be indicative of the diplomatic limbo in which the Soviets existed following their early history.
• Mr. Jones' last ditch effort to re-take the farm (The Battle of the Cowshed) is analogous to the Russian Civil War in which the western capitalist governments sent soldiers to try to remove the Bolsheviks from power.
• Napoleon's removal of Snowball is like Stalin’s removal of Leon Trotsky from power in 1927 and his subsequent expulsion and murder.
• Squealer constantly changing the commandments on Napoleon's orders may refer to the constant line of adjustments to the Communist theory by the people in power. Also, his lies to animals of past events they cannot remember refers to the revision of history texts to glorify Stalin during his regime.
• After Old Major dies, his skull is placed on display on a tree stump. Similarly, Lenin's embalmed body was put on display in Lenin's Tomb in Red Square post-mortem, where it still remains. It should also be noted that the tomb of Karl Marx is adorned by an extremely large bust of his likeness which lends more credibility to Old Major being a closer reference to Karl Marx than to Lenin. Marx's tomb is located in Highgate Cemetery, London.
• When Napoleon steals Snowball’s idea for a windmill, the windmill can be considered a symbol of the Soviet Five-Year Plans, a concept developed by Trotsky and adopted by Stalin, who, after banning Trotsky from the Soviet Union, claimed them to be his idea. The failure of the windmill to generate the expected creature comforts and subsequent search for saboteurs is probably a reference to accusations and a show trial against British engineers who were working on electrification projects in the USSR.
• Moses the raven leaving the farm for a while and then returning is similar to the Russian Orthodox Church going underground and then being brought back to give the workers (false) hope.
• Boxer's motto, "Napoleon is always right" is strikingly similar to «Il Duce ha sempre ragione» ("Mussolini is always right"), a chant used to hail Benito Mussolini during his rule of Italy from 1922 to 1943.
• During the rise of Napoleon, he ordered the collection of all the hens' eggs. In an act of defiance, the hens destroyed their eggs rather than give them to Napoleon. During Stalin's collectivization period in the early 1930s, many Ukrainian peasants burned their crops and farms rather than handing them over to the government.
• Napoleon's mass executions, of which many were unfair for the alleged crimes, is similar to Stalin executing his political enemies for various crimes after they were tortured and forced to falsify confessions.
• The four pigs that defy Napoleon's will are comparable with the purged party members during the Great Purge — Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and many others.
• Napoleon replaces the farm anthem "Beasts of England" with an inane composition by the pig poet Minimus ("Animal Farm, Animal Farm / Never through me / Shall thou come to harm"). In 1943, Stalin replaced the old national anthem "the Internationale" with "the Hymn of the Soviet Union." The old Internationale glorified the revolution and "the people." The original version of the Hymn of the Soviet Union glorified Stalin so heavily that after his death in 1953, entire sections of the anthem had to be replaced or removed. Orwell could have also been referring to Napoleon Bonaparte's banning of the French national hymn, La Marseillaise in 1799.
• Napoleon works with Mr. Frederick, who eventually betrays Animal Farm and destroys the windmill. Though Animal Farm repels the human attack, many animals are wounded and killed. This is similar to Stalin’s Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, which was later betrayed in 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Though the Soviet Union won the war, it came at a tremendous price of roughly 8.5-15 million Soviet soldiers (unconfirmed) and many civilians, resulting in an incredible estimated 20 million dead, as well as the utter destruction of the Western Soviet Union and its prized collective farms that Stalin had created in the 1930s. The detonation of the windmill and the battle that ensued there could also be a reference to the Battle of Stalingrad. The selling of the farm's excess timber supply could represent the offering of raw materials to the United States in exchange for weapons of war under the Lend-Lease.
• Napoleon changing Animal Farm back to Manor echoes the Red Army’s name change from the "Workers' and Peasants' Red Army" to the "Soviet Army" to appear as a more appealing and professional organization rather than an army of the common people.
• Squealer may be an allegory of the Soviet Newspaper in which Stalin often wrote many of the articles anonymously to give the impression the country was far better off than it was.
• The dogs may be an allegory to the NKVD (KGB), the elite police force who ruled by terror under Stalin's hand.
• Boxer, in the allegory of the novel, directly relates to the working class who labored under strenuous and exceedingly difficult conditions throughout the Communist regime with the hope that their work would result in a more prosperous life. Boxer represents this clearly at points when he utters such quotes as "I will work harder" in response to any sort of difficulty. In the context of the story, this also allows Boxer to become a tool of propaganda to be used by Napoleon and his regime later on once Boxer has been murdered to pay for a crate of whiskey for the pigs.
• When Napoleon and Snowball argue about how Animal Farm should be ruled, Napoleon favors acquiring weapons to defend the farm while Snowball favored getting other farms (countries) to rebel. This is similar to Stalin wanting "Socialism in one country" and Trotsky's theory of "Permanent Revolution."
• The term "four legs good, two legs bad" could be symbolic for the simplification of the April Theses, for workers to understand it better.
• Napoleon once creates and awards himself with the Order of the Green Banner, a reference to the Soviet Union's Order of the Red Banner.
• The character of Boxer could be an allusion to the fiancial state of Russia at the time of publication.

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British censorship and suppressed preface

During World War II it became apparent to Orwell that anti-Russian literature was not something which most major publishing houses would touch — including his regular publisher Gollancz. One publisher he sought to sell his book to rejected it on the grounds of government advice — although the assumed civil servant who gave the order was later found to be a Soviet spy.

Orwell originally prepared a preface which complains about British government suppression of his book, self-imposed British self-censorship and how the British people were suppressing criticism of the USSR, their World War II ally. "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. ... kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact." Somewhat ironically, the preface itself was censored and is not published with most copies of the book.

Cultural references

References to the novella are frequent in other works of popular culture, particularly in popular music and television series.

Adaptations

• 1954 animated film — The book was the basis of an animated feature film in 1954 (Britain's first full-length animated movie), directed by John Halas and Joy Batchelor and quietly commissioned by the American CIA. This version softened the theme of the story slightly by reducing the role of Moses, the character representing religion. It also added an epilogue where the other animals successfully revolt against the pigs immediately after the novel's iconic concluding imagery is depicted.

• 1999 live-action film — A live action film directed by John Stephenson, with voices by Kelsey Grammer as Snowball, Patrick Stewart as Napoleon, and Ian Holm as Squealer. Despite a few differences (such as completely different songs), the plot generally resembles that of the book, although once again the role of Moses is somewhat softened (Sugarcandy Mountain is never mentioned). The film diverges from the book with an additional epilogue in which Jesse the dog and several animals escape and return years later to a post-Napoleon era Animal Farm. This is an update which could be seen as an analogy to the fall of the Soviet Union. In the film, Jesse, one of the female dogs, is now the main character, protagonist, and narrator.

Editions

• ISBN 0-582-02173-1 (paper text, 1989)
• ISBN 0-15-107255-8 (hardcover, 1990)
• ISBN 0-582-06010-9 (paper text, 1991)
• ISBN 0-679-42039-8 (hardcover, 1993)
• ISBN 0-606-00102-6 (prebound, 1996)
• ISBN 0-15-100217-7 (hardcover, 1996, Anniversary Edition)
• ISBN 0-452-27750-7 (paperback, 1996, Anniversary Edition)
• ISBN 0-451-52634-1 (mass market paperback, 1996, Anniversary Edition)
• ISBN 0-582-53008-3 (1996)
• ISBN 1-56000-520-3 (cloth text, 1998, Large Type Edition)
• ISBN 0-7910-4774-1 (hardcover, 1999)
• ISBN 0-451-52536-1 (paperback, 1999)
• ISBN 0-7641-0819-0 (paperback, 1999)
• ISBN 0-8220-7009-X (e-book, 1999)
• ISBN 0-7587-7843-0 (hardcover, 2002)
• ISBN 0-15-101026-9 (hardcover, 2003, with Nineteen Eighty-Four)
• ISBN 0-452-28424-4 (paperback, 2003, Centennial Edition)
• ISBN 0-8488-0120-2 (hardcover)
• ISBN 0-03-055434-9 (hardcover) Animal Farm with Connections
• ISBN 0-395-79677-6 (hardcover) Animal Farm & Related Readings, 1997

References

1. Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm
2. Letter to Herbert Read, 18 August, 1945.
3. Taylor, D.J. (2003). Orwell: The Life. ISBN 0-8050-7473-2. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) p. 337 Writing to Leonard Moore, a partner in the literary agency of Christy & Moore, publisher "Jonathan Cape explained that the decision had been taken on the advice of a senior official in the Ministry of Information. Such flagrant anti-Soviet bias was unacceptable: and the choice of pigs as the dominant class was thought to be especially offensive. The `important official' was, or so it may reasonably be assumed, a man named Peter Smollett, later unmasked as a Soviet agent."
4. Orwell, George (1995). "Triumph of the Herd Instinct; Animal Farm, the savage satire against Stalin, became a worldwide best-seller but publication was delayed by sensitivity to Britain's Russian ally". The Guardian: 28. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
5. Orwell, George (1995). "The freedom of the press, rediscovered preface to 'Animal Farm'". New Statesman & Society. 8 (366): 11. ISSN 0954-2361. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
6. "George Orwell: The Freedom of the Press". Archive.org. Retrieved May 12, 2006.
7. CIA, Movie Producer

External links

• Lua error in Module:Gutenberg at line 74: Parameter id is missing. See Template:Gutenberg Australia documentation.
• Extensive summary of Animal Farm and list of important quotes (author biography included)
• Animal Farm Summary and Analysis
• Excerpts from Orwell's letters to his agent concerning Animal Farm

• 1945 novels
• Animal Farm
• English novels
• Fictional farms
• Books by George Orwell
• Novellas
• Satirical novels
• Literature featuring anthropomorphic characters
• Books critical of communism and communists