George Orwell and Animal Farm

George Orwell (the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair) was born in India in 1903, the son of an English administrator. After being educated at Eton (“the most costly and snobbish of the English Public Schools”, so he claimed), Orwell served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned in 1927 and became a writer, initially unsuccessful. He spent several years living in poverty, often on the streets (for an account of these times, his book Down and Out in Paris and London is well worth reading). During this period, his experiences with the poorer elements of society, particularly the miners in Northern England, caused him to develop pro-Socialist attitudes. He married in 1936 and six months later traveled to Spain in order to fight the Fascists during the Civil War. He was shot through the throat by a sniper, although he survived.

Whilst in Spain, Orwell became involved with a Trotskyist militia group. When a Communist faction gained some control of the Spanish government in 1937, Orwell’s group were one of many hunted down. A number of his colleagues were shot or ‘disappeared’, although he himself escaped.

Orwell recognized the parallels between the Spanish man-hunts and similar (albeit greater) purges taking place in the Soviet Union. He realized that a primary issue was the use of propaganda by totalitarian states to influence the minds of the populace against certain groups. He was particularly disturbed that, upon returning to the United Kingdom, press accounts of the purges were often wildly inaccurate, following the Soviet accounts of events.

Although Orwell had never visited Russia, and indeed would not condemn Stalin for his methods, he felt that it was vital that people in Western Europe saw the truth about the Soviet regime. He was struck by the irony that Soviet society was moving further away from Socialism and that in the relative comfort of English culture there was a total lack of understanding regarding the nature of Stalinist Russia. Animal Farm was written, at least partly, as a way of destroying the Soviet myth and reviving the Socialist movement in the West, which had been severely damaged.

Animal Farm was inspired by Orwell’s observation of a little boy driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. He saw the parallel between this image and the manner in which the rich exploit their workers. He was further able to analyse t he teachings of Karl Marx, the foundation of Communism, and place it in the context of the relationship between animals and humans, where the class struggle becomes irrelevant as an issue.

Orwell stated, “if the work does not speak for itself, it is a failure”. However, he was clear that although many elements from the plot were taken directly from the history of the Russian Revolution, some of the chronology was changed for dramatic effect. More importantly, Orwell was concerned that the conclusion of the book had been misread by many critics. His opinion was that although there was an improvement in relationship between the pigs and men (reflecting a similar state of affairs between East and West at the time), this could not last. As events showed, he was not wrong.

Paraphrased from Orwell’s introduction to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, March 1947

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