Animal Farm Book Review

Animal Farm

A review by:

Dimitrios Pastirmatzis

"Animal Farm is an allegorical and dystopian novella by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945"(1)

Animal Farm is a book written in England on the 17th of August of 1945, when the Soviet Union was in the midst of the Stalinist era and is critical of the situation that was developing there. In George Orwell's views the Soviet union was turned into an inhumane dictatorship built around a single man and enforced through sheer terror of various punishments and/or executions. The author deems his book a "fairy story", but the book is anything but. The animals of Manor Farm, plagued by malnurishment and the injustice that was forced upon them, revolt against their human

Old Major is a combination of Karl Marx and Lenin, as the one that planted the seeds of the rebellion. Then we have Napoleon, that is an metaphor for Joseph Stalin. But not all animals in the farm were in accord with Napoleons choices, Snowball , that is based on Leon Trotsky, exists in the novel, and as with his human counterpart, he attempts to fight the growing influence of Napoleon. On the Human side we have Mr Jones that represents the figure of Russian Tsar Nicholas the Second, who was removed from power and killed with the rest of his family, Mr Frederick who is an allegory for Adolf Hitler, given that he enters a temporary truce with the animals only to betray them shortly

In the novel it is clear how the corrupt pig regime uses illiteracy to assume control over the masses of the animals, due to the fact that few of them were intelligent enough to be able to read and/or write. This fact was seen in the Union during the Soviet era where the level of literacy was low and those that had the priviledge of being literate where the ones that controlled the , intentionally kept, ignorant masses. Furthermore the regime used spies that were monitoring their own populace, looking for any signs of unrest that was swiftly and promptly put