Animal Farm by George Orwell has sold millions since its release on August 17, 1945. But it did not seem to Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, that the book would draw huge sales.
Though released in 1945 (80 years ago), Orwell had actually written Animal Farm in 1943. And he struggled to find a publisher. As noted by the late Russell Baker in an afterword to Animal Farm in a 1996 edition, the tale was an indictment of Joseph Stalin, the genocidal leader of the Soviet Union. And Stalin, whose Red Army was then driving back the Nazi war machine, enjoyed worldwide popularity (even in the United States). Anyone in the free world critical of Stalin was considered a dupe for Hitler.
The specific case against Stalin in Animal Farm regards the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon Lenin’s death in 1922, Stalin jockeyed for position against fellow communist leader Leon Trotsky (who was driven from Russia by Stalin and eventually murdered in Mexico in 1940).
Napoleon, the aggressive and totalitarian pig in Animal Farm, represents Stalin. Snowball, the tame and compassionate pig banished from the farm by Napoleon, represents Trotsky. Where Orwell errs (and what is neglected by literary critics) is that Snowball is not an accurate portrayal of Trotsky, a brutal dictator very much on a par with Stalin. Though literary critics appreciate Orwell’s depiction of Trotsky (by way of Snowball), historians would take issue with the Snowball characterization of Trotsky in Animal Farm.
Literary pundits, including Baker, are also negligent in citing Animal Farm as the product of Orwell’s experience in the civil war in Spain in the 1930s. Orwell did fight on the side of the socialists in Spain and was disillusioned (to say the least) with Stalinist elements opposed to Franco’s fascists. The war in Spain (dramatized by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia) influenced the author’s realization that Stalin was a criminal and that the notion of the Soviet Union as the workers’ utopia was a deception.
But the war in Animal Farm, which led to Napoleon and the pigs forsaking the other animals by making a pact with the neighboring farmers (only to wage another war at the very end of the book), was more a parody of the real life pact between Hitler and Stalin in 1939 (which became a mere scrap of paper when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941).
Orwell was certainly trying in Animal Farm to alert the world to Stalin’s atrocities. Whether it was the war against Franco or the war against Hitler highlighted in Animal Farm is less important than the challenge Orwell was meeting in articulating the danger of Stalin.
Not that Orwell was completely reasonable in his view of Stalin. There is no question that Stalin was (and is) one of history’s most notorious villains. But the democratic allies in World War II had no choice in their embrace of Stalin. So essential was Stalin in the allied war effort that eighty percent of German casualties were on the Russian front.
But the importance of Animal Farm cannot be overstated. Orwell’s classic tale, now 80 years old, was indispensable in exposing Stalin as a threat to the world and a warning to the naive on the political left regarding the true nature of communism and the specter of Russian aggression. Animal Farm should also be required reading for our own president who is bent on the appeasement of Putin (whose favorite leader happens to be…Stalin).
John O’Neill is an Allen Park free-lance writer and a graduate of Wayne State University
