George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-utopian satire of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. However, it is written as a fable about a group of barnyard animals who overthrow their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own based upon the founding principle: “All animals are equal.” Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. The founding principle of the society is then amended to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Orwell was a self-identified socialist who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), a bloody battle between the conservative fascist-backed Nationalists and Spain’s leftist communist-supported Republican government. Orwell fought on behalf of the Republicans, in the militia of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. However, infighting on the left led to political purges, and Orwell returned to England. He later wrote that he was “lucky to get out of Spain alive,” because many of his friends there were shot, imprisoned, or disappeared. Dismayed and angry at Stalin’s rise to power and the cause’s principles turning to totalitarianism, he wrote Animal Farm with the desire “that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was.”