Compare the story of Animal Farm to the history of the Russian Revolution. In what ways does it serve as allegory? What does Orwell achieve with Animal Farm?
George Orwell composed Animal Farm as an allegory for the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution occurred in 1917 when the Russian people rose up against Tsar Nicholas II after the abortion that was the Russian Empire’s entry into the Great War on the Eastern Front. The Russian revolutionaries, led by such people as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, established a new government with Communism professed as its guiding ideology. Other states and other Russians, fearful of this new ideology, intervened in the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, fought between the White Monarchists and the Red Communists, with international parties supplying and supporting the Whites. Eventually, this failed and the Russian Empire was dashed away, replaced by the Soviet Union. The remnants of the Mensheviks, defeated by the Bolshevik Leninist wing of the Communist Party, were gradually removed from government; Trotsky, who served as opposition to Stalin, Lenin’s successor, was exiled in 1928. Animal Farm was written by George Orwell, a man of socialist proclivities, in the 1940s, published in 1944, during the Second World War and the time of the Soviet Stalinist government. It details a revolution similar to the Russian Revolution that takes place on a farm, with the animals rising up under the leadership of literal pigs, and follows a course similar to the Russian Revolution. Thus, Orwell makes use of Animal Farm as an allegory of the Russian Revolution through comparing the Revolution’s experience in corruption of the bureaucracy, centralization of power around a single leader, and oppression of dissidents through forced starvation.
An allegory refers to what is, in essence, an extended metaphor that is used to convey a comparison of real-life events, actions, objects, or people, to fictionalized representations, often using a story as a vehicle to achieve this, although other art forms can be used to achieve the same result. Lord of the Flies by William Golding is an example of allegory written around a similar timeframe as Animal Farm, dealing with the effects of war upon a society, such as how the conch represents law and order that is diminished as chaos overtakes people in the form of the fire representing hope and destruction at the same time through continued conflict. Allegory in Animal Farm can be observed in the representation of the corruption of the Russian Soviet as time passed manifested in the form of the pigs slowly taking control and becoming corrupt. The pigs represent the Communist Party who, as the sole members of the government of the Soviet Union, began to abuse their power for their own benefit. In the book, the pigs could be demonstrated to be corrupt in them taking control of luxury items such as the milk and apples for their personal pleasure, explaining it away to a bewildered populace (25). This is much the same as how luxury goods of the Soviet Union previously belonging to the nobility were transferred to the members of the Communist Party even as those very same members espoused ideals of frugality and simplicity rather than decadence among the workers.
The centralization of power around Napoleon is very similar to the centralization of power and cult of personality that developed around Josef Stalin. Following Vladimir Lenin’s death, Stalin began to remove all opposition to his ideas and set himself up as an all powerful figure, exiling or executing opposition figures such as Leon Trotsky. Old Communists who had been eliminated were removed from official historical records and history was rewritten to depict Stalin in a positive light. This is very similar to what Napoleon did in Animal Farm; Snowball could be said to have represented Leon Trotsky, and when Napoleon seized power and kicked Snowball out of the Animal Farm, Squealer assisted in rewriting history to glorify Napoleon, and Minimus helped to build the cult of personality around Napoleon through the composing of songs, for example (40). The committee was first made a rump government before being abolished in full, with Napoleon holding supreme unilateral power (40), much as Stalin did in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution despite the existence of the Supreme Soviet.
While it is unknown as to what extent George Orwell was aware of the Holodomor (forced starvation) that occurred in Ukraine in the 1930s when he was writing Animal Farm, the rebellious hens being starved on the orders of Napoleon is nonetheless reminiscent of the policies the Soviet Union pursued under Stalin to suppress political dissidents. When the hens opposed Napoleon’s policies and stood up for themselves, much as the Ukrainians became dissatisfied with Soviet policies, making Ukrainian nationalism more popular. Just as in the Soviet Union, Napoleon starved the hens until they cooperated (53), much as the Holodomor artificially starved Ukrainians until they were no longer able or willing to stand up against the Soviet government. Napoleon’s policies regarding food requisition for sale or for other members of the farm (the pigs and dogs) as well as his policies regarding food theft with harsh punishments were also very similar (53) to the Soviet policies regarding grain instituted around the time of the Holodomor.
Orwell was a well known socialist and idealist who believed in the hope for a better, more egalitarian society. When he wrote Animal Farm, he had become disillusioned with the cause of the Soviets and the Communists they supported, at the least, for he bore witness to the transition of the Communist government to totalitarianism. Animal Farm is meant to serve as a warning against totalitarianism and how easy it is for well-meaning socialist-inspired movements to be hijacked by totalitarians, as was the case in the Soviet Union and as was the case in the countries in which they supported communists, such as the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War. Animal Farm allegorizes the Russian Revolution in several ways, such as corruption, centralization of power, and suppression of political dissidence, as a manifestation of Orwell’s misgivings about Soviet communism, idealizing Old Major and Snowball much as Orwell idealized socialism. Make no mistake, Orwell remained a committed and believing socialist, but Animal Farm was written as a reminder of what could happen should socialist movements be subverted into totalitarian states.