Animal Farm

Though I cant say that I am particularly fond of the novel, I have to admit that Animal Farm does provide a point of view of the Russia Revolution that is hard to come by. Instead of trying to cover up and give reasons for Stalin's actions like most documents from that era in Russian history tend to do, Orwell presents the series of events through an unbiased point of view. After finding the not so subtly hidden allegory between real life historical figures and the pigs in Animal Farm, its easy to find parallels between the story and the real events. Right from the beginning we can see that Old Major is a combination of Lenin and Marx because he sparks the idea of the Animal Farm and a separate and superior animal WORKER race (making him Marx), starts the revolution, and then shortly dies (making him Lenin). Then, in Chapters 4-6, it becomes clear that Napoleon and Snowball represent Stalin and Trotsky. Snowball shows characteristics of Trotsky like the ability to persuade people through words like Trotsky could do with pictures. Napoleon is more quiet and cunning like Stalin was. At the end of chapter 5, he shows Stalin like tendencies when he sends his secret band of puppies (suspiciously similar to the NKVD) after Snowball and then persuades everyone that Snowball is bad, just like Stalin did with Trotsky. The rest of the story seems to follow history as it is showing the pigs giving themselves more and more power, all the while justifying it by convincing everyone that it is the right thing to do. The animals on the farm have no ability to say their actual opinions, just like the people who did not have power had no voice in the Communist movement. I think that in the rest of the story, we will be able to see that the more the pigs give themselves power, the more they will find themselves becoming the things they hate--the humans.

I think that Orwell wrote this book to show what the Communist movement looked like from the outside. All documents from that era are biased towards Stalin, because he would have killed them if they weren't. Animal Farm provides an unbiased point of view of the events during that time in history, but it also makes the lesson easier to grasp. It's much easier to figure that what happens in the book is bad when reading it about animals because it makes the subject lighter.