Orwell (22 page)

Orwell describes the creative impulse of the book in his Preface: “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyse Marx's theory from the animals' point of view.”

Major's speech is an accurate exposition of orthodox Marxism and is very similar to the last paragraph of the
Communist Manifesto
(1848).
¹³
The Communists

openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

All the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings. Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! This is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion! (8)

In his
Critique of the Gotha Program
, Marx stated, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”; when Animal Farm is established, “everyone worked according to his capacity” (25). Squealer's ingenious gloss of “Four legs good, two legs bad” is a witty and ironic example of specious Marxist polemics: “A bird's wing, comrades … is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg” (29).

Comrade Napoleon
, the poem of Minimus (who is based on the poet Mayakovsky),
¹⁴
is a close imitation of adulatory Soviet verse like the “Hymn to J. V. Stalin”:

The world has no person

Dearer, closer.

With him, happiness is happier,

And the sun brighter.
¹⁵

Friend of the fatherless!

Fountain of happiness!

Lord of the swill-bucket! Oh, how my soul is on

Fire when I gaze at thy

Calm and commanding eye,

Like the sun in the sky,

Comrade Napoleon! (78)

Parts of the revolutionary song, “Beasts of England,” is a close paraphrase of certain lines of “L'Internationale” (1871):

C'est l'éruption de la fin

Soon or late the day is coming

Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans!

Tyrant Man shall be o'erthrown

La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes

And the fruitful fields of England

Shall be trod by beasts alone

Foule esclave, debout! Debout!

Rings shall vanish from our noses

Le soleil brillera toujours!

Bright will shine the fields of England.

“L'Internationale” expresses the brief but idealistic exhilaration that Orwell experienced in Barcelona. As he wrote to Cyril Connolly from Spain in 1937, “I have seen wonderful things & at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.” His moving description of life in the Spanish militia is similar in feeling to the joyous freedom of the animals after the Rebellion:

One had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality…. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me.”
¹⁶

Yes, it was theirs—everything that they could see was theirs! In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they
hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement…. Then they made a tour of inspection of the whole farm and surveyed [it] with speechless admiration…. It was as though they had never seen these things before, and even now they could hardly believe that it was all their own (18–19).

Immediately after the pigs celebrate their victory and bury “some hams hanging in the kitchen” (a wonderful detail), the revolutionary principles of Major are codified by Snowball into “The Seven Commandments” (which are reminiscent of the Five Chief Beatitudes of the Pukka Sahib in
Burmese Days).
The corruption inherent in the Rebellion is manifested as each of the Commandments is successively betrayed, until none of the original revolutionary idealism remains. The structure of the book is circular, and by the time the name is changed back to Manor Farm, there has been a painful return to the status quo (or worse) with whiskey and whips in the trotters of the pigs.

In the Preface to
Animal Farm
, Orwell writes: “although various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is changed.” Thus, the human beings are capitalists, the animals are Communists, the wild creatures who could not be tamed and “continued to behave very much as before” (27) are the
muzhiks
or peasants, the pigs are the Bolsheviks, the Rebellion is the October Revolution, the wave of rebelliousness that ran through the countryside afterwards is the abortive revolution in Hungary and Germany in 1919 and 1923, the hoof and horn is the hammer and sickle, the Spontaneous Demonstration is the May Day celebration, the Order of the Green Banner is the Order of Lenin, the special pig committee presided over by Napoleon is the Politbureau, and the revolt of the hens—the
first
rebellion since the expulsion of Jones (the Czar)—is the sailors' rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in 1921.

The carefully chosen animals' names are both realistic and highly suggestive of their owners' personality and role in the novel. The imperious Major (Marx-Lenin) is military, dominant and senior (in public school slang); the rather stupid and self-sacrificing Boxer (the proletariat), who is contrasted to the cynical Benjamin and the indifferent and unenthusiastic cat, is named after the Chinese revolutionaries who drove out foreign exploiters and were themselves crushed; Mollie (the White Russians) suggests folly, and her retrogressive defection for vanity and luxury is a paradigm of the entire revolution; Moses (the Russian Orthodox and later the Catholic Church) brings divine law to man; Squealer (a living
Pravda)
is onomatopoetic for a voluble pig; and Whymper, the pigs' agent, suggests a toady.
Pilkington (Churchill-England), the capitalist exploiter, connotes bilk and milk (slang): he is an old-fashioned gentleman who enjoys country sports on Foxwood, which has associations of both craftiness and the Tory landed gentry. Frederick (Hitler) refers to Frederick the Great, the founder of the Prussian military state and Hitler's hero. Frederick is a tough, shrewd man who drives hard bargains, steals other people's land for his own farm, Pinchfield, and practices terrible cruelties upon his subjects. These cruelties are related to the most moving scene in the novel—when Boxer is taken to the slaughterhouse. The knacker's van recalls the terrible gas vans used by the
Einsatzgruppen
for mobile extermination. Though Clover screams out, “They are taking you to your death!” the sound of Boxer's drumming hoofs inside the van “grew fainter and died away” (102).

The most important animals are Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky), whose personalities are antithetical and who are never in agreement. Both characters are drawn fully and accurately, though with simple strokes, and reflect almost all the dominant characteristics of their historical models. Like Trotsky, Orwell compares Stalin to Napoleon, for both turned revolutions into dictatorships (Bonapartism was the successor to Thermidor), and both transformed a national popular “revolution from below” into a foreign conqueror's “revolution from above” and forcibly imposed their revolutionary ideology on other countries. Napoleon the pig is fierce-looking, “not much of a talker [his speeches are “short and to the point”], but with a reputation for getting his own way” (13). He dominates the party machinery, controls the education of the young and is superb at plotting and “canvassing support for himself” in between meetings.
¹⁷
Napoleon never presents any plans and always criticizes Snowball's, though he eventually adopts these plans and even claims he invented them. He first distorts and then changes history, blames Snowball for all his own failures, accuses him of plotting with foreign enemies, drives him into exile and finally pronounces his death sentence. He also publishes fantastic production figures, takes “credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune” (78), wins elections unanimously, names cities after himself and replaces the cult of Major (“the animals were required to file past the skull in a reverent manner”) with a more elaborate one of his own (49). As Orwell wrote in 1941, “One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro-Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges etc are suddenly forgotten.”

The name Snowball recalls Trotsky's white hair and beard and the fact that he melted before Stalin's opposition. Snowball is a brilliant speaker, sometimes unintelligible to the masses but always eloquent and impressive,
more vivacious and inventive than Napoleon, and a much greater writer. He is also intellectual and energetic. For as Deutscher writes of Trotsky in 1921, besides running the army and serving on the Politbureau, “He was busy with a host of other assignments each of which would have made a full-time job for any man of less vitality and ability. He led, for instance, the Society of the Godless…. He was at this time Russia's chief intellectual inspirer and leading literary critic. He frequently addressed audiences.”
¹⁸
Orwell's description of Snowball's activities, though comic, is close to reality: “Snowball also busied himself with organising the other animals into what he called Animal Committees…. He formed the Egg Production Committee for the hens, the Clean Tails League for the Cows, the Wild Comrades Re-education Committee … and various others, besides instituting classes in reading and writing” (27). Snowball studies military history, organizes, commands and leads the Army to victory in the Battle of the Cowshed (the Civil War) when foreign powers help Mr. Jones and invade the farm (Russia). After the War he “was full of plans for innovations and improvements” (41).

Two of the most important battles between Trotsky and Stalin are allegorized in the novel. Trotsky advocated manufacturing over agricultural priorities and fought for accelerated industrialization, and his ideas for the expansion of the Socialist sector of the economy were eventually adopted by Stalin in the first five-year plan of 1928 (which called for collectivization
and
industrialization): “Snowball conjured up pictures of fantastic machines which would do their work for them while they grazed at their ease in the fields … so much labour would be saved that the animals would only need to work three days a week” (42–43).
¹⁹
Stalin wanted comprehensive and drastic collectivization of private farms: Napoleon “argued that the great need of the moment was to increase food production, and that if they wasted time on the windmill they would all starve to death” (43).

The central ideological issue between Stalin and Trotsky concerned the theory of “Socialism in One Country” against the idea of “Permanent Revolution.” Deutscher writes that “two rival and quasi-Messianic beliefs seemed pitted against one another: Trotskyism with its faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat of the West; and Stalinism with its glorification of Russia's socialist destiny.”
²⁰
Orwell presents this controversy in simpler but entirely accurate words: “According to Napoleon, what the animals must do was to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them. According to Snowball, they must send out more and more pigeons and stir up rebellion among the animals on the other farms. The one argued that if they could not defend themselves they were bound to be conquered, the other argued that if rebellions happened everywhere they would have no need to defend themselves” (44).

When Snowball comes to the crucial points in his speeches, “It was noticed that [the sheep] were especially liable to break into ‘Four legs good, two legs bad'” (41), just as in the party Congress in 1927, at Stalin's instigation, “pleas for the opposition were drowned in the continual, hysterically intolerant uproar from the floor.”
²¹
The Trotsky-Stalin conflict reached a crucial point in mid-1927 after Britain broke diplomatic relations with Russia and ruined Stalin's hopes for an agreement between Soviet and British trade unions; the Russian ambassador to Poland was assassinated; and Chiang Kai-shek massacred the Chinese Communists who had joined him at Stalin's orders. Trotsky and the Opposition issued a declaration attacking Stalin for these failures, but before they could bring this before the party Congress and remove Stalin from power, he expelled Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev from the Party.
²²
Orwell writes of this vital moment in Soviet history, which signaled the final defeat of Trotsky, “by the time he [Snowball] had finished speaking, there was no doubt as to the way the vote would go. But just at this moment,” Napoleon's dogs (the GPU or Secret Police) attack Snowball and force him to flee the farm and go into exile (45).

Orwell is not primarily interested in the practical or ideological merits of these controversies, for he believed (wrongly, I think) that
both
men had betrayed the revolution. He told a friend “that Trotsky-Snowball was potentially as big a villain as Stalin-Napoleon, although he was Napoleon's victim. The first note of corruption was struck when the pigs secretly had the cows' milk added to their own mash and Snowball consented to this first act of inequity.”
²³
He wrote in 1939, the year before Trotsky's murder, “It is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind.”