Animal Farm - Significance and Allegory

Significance and Allegory

In the Eastern Bloc both Animal Farm and later, also Nineteen Eighty-Four were on the list of forbidden books up until the end of communism in 1989, and were only available via clandestine Samizdat networks.

Orwell biographer Jeffrey Meyers has written that "virtually every detail has political significance in this allegory". Orwell himself wrote in 1946, " Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution.. that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert.." And in a preface he wrote in 1947 for a Ukrainian edition he stated ; " ...for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement. On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages."

The revolt of the animals against Farmer Jones is Orwell's analogy with the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Jones's attempt to regain control, with the aid of neighbouring farmers, parallels the Western powers' efforts 1918-21 to crush the Bolsheviks. The pigs' rise to pre-eminence mirrors the rise of a Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, just as Napoleon's emergence as the farm's sole leader reflects Stalin's emergence. The pigs' appropriation of milk and apples for their own use, "the turning point of the story" as Orwell termed it in a letter to Dwight Macdonald, stands as an analogy for the crushing of the left-wing 1921 Kronstadt revolt against the Bolsheviks, and the difficult efforts of the animals to build the windmill bring to mind the various Five Year Plans. The puppies controlled by Napoleon parallel the nurture of the secret police in the Stalinist structure and the pigs' treatment of the other animals on the farm recalls the internal terror faced by the populace in the 1930s. In chapter seven when the animals confess their nonexistent crimes, and are slain, Orwell directly alludes to the purges, the confessions and show trials of the late 1930s. These contributed to Orwell's conviction that the Bolshevik revolution had been corrupted and the Soviet system become rotten.

Peter Edgerly Firchow and Peter Hobley Davison consider that in real life, with events in Animal Farm mirroring those in the Soviet Union, the Battle of the Windmill represents the Great Patriotic War (World War II), especially the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Moscow. During the battle, Fredrick drills a hole and places explosives inside, and this was followed by "All the animals, including Napoleon" took cover; Orwell had the publisher alter this to "All the animals except Napoleon" in recognition of Joseph Stalin's decision to remain in Moscow during the German advance. This very particular alteration had been occasioned by Orwells having been in Paris in March 1945, working as a war correspondent for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News. In Paris he met Joseph Czapski, a survivor of the Katyn Massacre. In spite of Czapski's opposition to the Soviet regime, he told Orwell, as Orwell wrote to Arthur Koestler, that it had been 'the character greatness of Stalin' that saved Russia from the German invasion.

The Battle of the Cowshed represents the allied invasion of the Soviet Russia in 1918, and the defeat of the White Russians in the Russian Civil War.

Other connections that writers on Orwell have suggested illustrate Orwell's telescoping of Russian history from 1917 to 1943 include the wave of rebelliousness that ran through the countryside after the Rebellion, which stands for the abortive revolutions in Hungary and Germany (Ch IV); the conflict between Napoleon and Snowball (ChV), paralleling "the two rival and quasi-Messianic beliefs that seemed pitted agaist one another: Trotskyism, with its faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat of the West; and Stalinism with its glorification of Russia's socialist destiny " ; Napoleon's dealings with Whymper and the Willingdon markets (Ch VI), paralleling the Treaty of Rapallo; and Frederick's bank notes, paralleling the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of August 1939, which are forgeries. Frederick attacks Animal Farm without warning and destroys the windmill.

The book's close, with the pigs and men in a kind of rapprochement, reflected Orwell's view of the 1943 Teheran Conference that seemed to display the establishment of "the best possible relations between the USSR and the West", - but in reality were destined, as Orwell presciently predicted, to continue to unravel. The disagreement between the allies and the start of the Cold War is suggested when Napoleon and Pilkington, both suspicious, " played an ace of spades simultaneously".