The Relationship Between Orwellâ€™s Animal Farm
The similarity between Animal Farm and the Russian Revolution is extremely blatant to anyone that is somewhat familiar to Russian history. The book tells how an entire farm of animals can talk and think like human beings, and then tells how they become the equivalent of the Russian government by trying to take over the farm in a Communistic fashion. The similarity between the book and the Russian Revolution can be shown in three major points: the symbolism behind the characters, the correspondence of events, and the usage of information censorship.
To begin with, the symbols the characters represent are either prominent groups or people that were part of the Russian Revolution. To begin with Old Major, the old wise boar that lives on the farm, symbolizes Karl Marx. In the book Old Major describes a perfect animal society and predicts a revolution to create it, but dies before the revolution begins. As shown in the Timeline of Select Events Karl Marx created, â€œâ€¦a revolutionary new idea: the political and social system called communism.â€ Also, Karl Marx dies before the revolution takes place. Another symbol is the character Napoleon. This pig was raised during the time of Old Major and takes over as a leader after the Revolution. Along with another pig named Snowball, he rules over the animals doing no physical work but instead gathering support from a third pig, Squealer, and training puppies to be his guard dogs. Eventually, he tries to kill Snowball, who escapes and is not seen again, and rules over the Animal Farm with an iron fist. This is very similar to Joseph Stalin. Like Napoleon, Stalin acted viciously to dissenters of his command as shown in this excerpt from the bibliographical reference Joseph Stalin; â€œNumerous political opponents, like a Bolshevik supporter named Trotsky, were killed, and more were arrested and sen