Animal Farm Essay

Animal Farm is a novella written by George Orwell based on the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s eventual rise to power. The story follows the story of a group of animals on a farm who free themselves from human control and create their own government. The story begins with the owner of Manor Farm, Mr. Jones, too drunk to remember to properly secure all the gates and doors of the buildings. Because of this, all the animals are free to convene in the barn to listen to a speech given by Old Major, an old prize winning boar. Old Major knows that his time is almost up and says that he feels he must tell them all of a dream he has had of a world in which animals are not oppressed by humans. He teaches them a song he calls “Beasts of England” which

Near the end of WWI, in 1917, there was a revolution in Russia, forcing their Tsar to abdicate; just as in Animal Farm, they revolt against the farmer Mr. Jones, forcing him to leave. Russia had undergone several military defeats and the poor were starving. Tsar Nicholas was forced to step down, and Russia became a republic, with Social Revolutionaries like Alexander Kerensky and Bolsheviks like Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin fighting for power. In the novella, this new government is represented by the

Old Major is a representation of Lenin. After the old pig’s death, the planning of the revolution he had spoken about fell to the other pigs, as they were considered the most intelligent of all the animals. Snowball is obviously a depiction of Trotsky. He argues with Napoleon over the leadership, and it comes to a vote for the animals between the two. It was a fairly equal division of votes, but in the end Napoleon banishes Snowball from the farm, just as Trotsky was exiled from Russia. Napoleon, of course, is the equivalent of Stalin. After expelling Snowball, he is now the only leader with no one to oppose him, and he slanders his former partner to the other animals on many occasions, such as when the windmill they were building collapsed and he claimed that Snowball had come back and ruined their progress. He also made sure no one remembered Snowball as a hero; he had his lackey Squealer tell all the animals after Snowball’s expulsion that Snowball’s part in the Battle of the Cowshed was “much exaggerated,” and that he was “no more than a