Animal Farm - Themes

George Orwell’s allegorical novel, ‘Animal Farm’ addresses many notions involved in the Russian Revolution, a catastrophic failure in the eyes of the world. A dictatorship set up in the stead of communism, an endless stream of lies and propaganda, as well as political agenda that had saturated the Soviet. It retells of the emergence and development of Soviet communism in a fable form; ‘Animal Farm’ allegorizes the rise of power of the dictator, Joseph Stalin and the revolution started by the people of Russia, which, in the end, destroyed and betrayed the people of Russia. In the novel, the overthrow of Jones by a [democratic?] coalition of animals, gives way to the consolidation of just about absolute power among the pigs. The pigs in ‘Animal Farm’, namely Napoleon, Squealer, and to a small extent, Snowball, establish themselves as the ruling class, the same way the intelligentsia of Russia began to dictate the revolutionists, thus corrupting and further more, misusing and abusing the socialist ideals of the Soviet Union.

Orwell has an unusual perspective on the entirety of the Russian Revolution. He regards himself as the ‘exposer’ of unpleasant truths about human society. George Orwell rewrote the Russian Revolution as ‘Animal Farm’ to expose the ‘soviet myth’ as he called it. He saw the mindless zombie-like acceptance of everything Stalin did in the name of socialism as damaging to the entire theoretical concept of socialism. The author believed that there always was something fundamentally flawed with human nature, and successfully portrayed it in ‘Animal Farm’. Unfortunately, Orwell had trouble expressing his views as ‘Animal Farm’ was repeatedly rejected, one of which was a letter from T.S.Eliot that read, “We have no conviction that this the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time.”

Although Orwell himself believed strongly in socialist society, he felt that the Soviet Union realized these ideals in a perverse form. Orwell shows the gradual disintegrations of the Seven Commandments as well as Squealer’s (Animal Farm’s