Animal Farm and the Russian Revolution

Animal Farm and the Russian Revolution In the beginning of George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, Old Major’s idea of an animal utopia drove the creatures of The Manor Farm to a rebellion. Slowly but surely, the vision of a place where animals could live happily ever after, without the cruel hands of mankind, diminished into an autocratic dictatorship run by comrade Napoleon. As the novel progresses, its events and characters begin to look more and more like the events and leaders of the Russian Revolution. Like Karl Marx’s idea of communism, all the animals would live equally, none rich, but none poor. Everyone would unite to take down the vicious leader, and in the end, everyone would work together to make Animal Farm the best it can be. Idealism, constant rule changes, and power struggle connect this fable with an important real life event. Old Major and Snowball paint a picture of an ideal place to be, a place where the animals were one and the same, wouldn’t work ungodly hours, and have everything they need. After all, the motto for the whole novel is “All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.” (7).The residents of Animal Farm, much like the citizens of Russia, dreamed of a place where all were equal and all of their needs were met. They believed that overthrowing their vindictive leader would be cause for a huge improvement on their daily lives. And it truly did, for a little while, at least, but a power struggle, like in the Revolution, resulted in everything going back to the exact way it was. This example demonstrates that it is, in fact, good to have hopes, dreams, and goals, but is probably best to start small, and if that works out, set bigger and better objectives. Keeping a set of rules is key to make anything work well. From the beginning of the book (page 7) the group has a set of rules that they will later call the Seven Commandments. They stick with the rules for a little while, when Snowball and Napoleon are in somewhat of a power struggle, but the rules are changed little by little, when Napoleon takes charge, into guidelines with totally different meanings. The animals think that they notice something different about the rules every so often, but Squealer pretty much tells them that they’re silly to even think that, that it was just their imagination. Some of the animals even witness Squealer painting the new words in the barn one night. Squealer represents the Soviet Press, which was controlled by Stalin, who tricked the Russian people into thinking that everything that Stalin did was in their best interest, even though it definitely wasn’t. I believe that this is important to the passage because it shows what can happen if a leader gets too much power, because it never seems to work out in the best interests of the people in the end. Power struggle plays a large role in both Animal Farm and the Russian Revolution. In history, the struggle was between Stalin and Trotsky, in the novel, Napoleon and Snowball. Snowball always has the farm’s best interest in mind when making decisions, while Napoleon was only concerned about his personal gain, much like Stalin. In the end, Snowball lacks the leadership traits, so Napoleon becomes the ruler of Animal Farm. Napoleon eventually exiles Snowball, like how Stalin exiles Trotsky, and uses him as a scapegoat for every problem the farm faces. He even goes as far as saying that Snowball was on Jones’s side the whole time, and he was in favor of human rule. This is important because like Stalin, Napoleon was trying to manipulate the other animals to get what he wanted, which in the end, made him just as bad, if not worse, than Jones.
Idealism, rule-breaking, and power struggle play huge roles in shaping this novel into what it turned out to be. These are all key components in showing how the farm went from something to improve the lives of all the animals, to a region of starvation and hard labor. The pigs are in charge and live like kings, all of the other animals suffer daily, and animals like Boxer work endlessly without reward or recognition. I don’t believe that it was the kind of place that Old Major and the other animals had in mind at the beginning of the rebellion. After Napoleon took over, nothing was ever in the best interests of the animals living on the farm. If those ideas hadn’t been included by Orwell, the story would have been a lot different and couldn’t have been an allegory of the Russian Revolution. All in all, this novel accurately portrays the event it is symbolizing and is overall a well written novel.