Animal Farm

How do you start a Animal Farm research paper? Our expert writers suggest like this:

George Orwells Animal Farm has always been recognized as a thinly disguised parody of the Soviet Union. Orwell used various animals to represent different classes of society.

• The pigs are the leaders of the revolution
• The horses are the brute laborers
• The dogs become the police enforcers
• The sheep are the blind followers

In understanding the October Revolution, it is important to remember that it was a putsch. Soviet mythology turned events into the grand struggle in which the Proletariat, represented by the Bolsheviks, finally toppled the Tsarist regime. Orwell saw through this, turning the Bolsheviks into pigs: Old Major (Lenin), Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball.

Both authors regarded Stalin as "practical," not a thinker, a lower intellect useful for day-to-day operations that others could not be bothered with. Orwell describes Napoleon as "not much of a talker, but with a reputation for getting his own way." Snowball is "a more vivacious pig than Napoleon, quicker in speech and more inventive, but was not considered to have the same depth of character". Indeed, after Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky began to withdraw from public affairs, seeing that Stalin was in actual control of the Party.

Animal Farm and Stalin

Stalin formed a triumvirate with Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1924, and in that year they began the first of the Party purges, removing all Communists who were intellectuals and theorists like Trotsky.

Stalin quickly began to change the face of Bolshevism with his ascension to power. What had been envisioned by Lenin as Soviet democracy, the brief "dictatorship of the Proletariat" spoken of by Marx, was systematically mutated into a dictatorship by Stalin, as he created both a Party that was "obedient, zealous, efficient, and above all obedient to the center" and a cult of personality that worshipped Stalin.

Orwell's Animal Farm

In Animal Farm, Boxer the horse repeats two mantras: "I will work harder," and "Napoleon is always right." Stalin's cult of personality turned to the phrase "Stalin the Genius" in crediting the leader with the creation of every idea within the USSR, and as the fountainhead of all Soviet knowledge. Stalin and the "Motherland" became synonymous, so that workers were encouraged to give their all for Comrade Stalin.

Orwell turns this into the subtle changes that occur to the rule of Animal Farm. Originally the pigs create seven commandments, which are altered as the pigs take on more attributes of the humans they replaced. Rule 4 is laid down as "no animal shall sleep in a bed," but later, "some of the animals were disturbed when they heard that the pigs slept in beds." Rule four is then to read: "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets". Stalin and his inner core began to assume a lifestyle rivaling the Tsar.