Eric Blair, a socialist born to British colonists in Bengal, India, wrote the novel Animal Farm under the penname George Orwell. Orwell fought for the socialist cause in the Spanish Civil War. He greatly opposed the Soviet Union, communism, and capitalism. In his novel, he uses animals on a farm to represent Soviet Communism. Every major character represents either a certain political leader, or a general grouping of them. They act out and perform the same things that they would have done, or possess uncannily similar characteristics to said political leaders. Orwell wrote the book to express his great disapproval of the Soviet Union and the treatment of the lower classes in Russia before and after the Russian Revolution. He is trying to show the cruel oppression of people, caused by the heads of the Soviet Union. Though the way the story is narrated is bipartisan, it shows the leaders to be greatly at fault.
Napoleon, Snowball, and Squealer are the three most intelligent animals on the farm, pigs. They take advantage of their knowledge and capacity of for learning and manipulate the more ignorant animals into agreeing with the way they think, what they believe, and everything for their better sake. Napoleon overthrows Snowball with his personal attack dogs, which he trained himself, in an overall struggle for power and dominance. Napoleon, as shown here, represents Joseph Stalin, by using military power to overthrow his enemies. Snowball represents Leon Trotsky, a man who gained support by his kindly words of wisdom rather than intimidation, cruelty, and brutality. Squealer is a propagandist; he gets everyone on the farm’s support rallied up for Napoleon, because Napoleon is greatly rising to power. Squealer also intimidates the lower classes, not by brutality, but by intelligence and more expansive vocabulary. The various other animals mainly represent slaves to the system, the lower class. They swallow up every word and everything that’s said to them,...