Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist — essentially a Trotskyist, or at least allied with Trotskyists. He saw what Stalinists were like while fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Stalinists fought the Trotskyists harder than they fought Franco.

Then Orwell saw millions of Englishmen fall for Stalin after WW2, when times were desperate in England. Orwell was genuinely afraid Stalinists would rise to power in England. And Stalinists did infiltrate the highest levels of government in the U.K. It wasn’t until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 that public opinion in the U.K. firmly turned against Stalin.

I think the book is about human nature and how easily power corrupts. You start off with good intention and some power because somebody has got to be in charge. But you keep seeking more power until you forgot what you set out to do in the first place.

It is just more upsetting in communism because at least in capitalism that was the goal in the first place.

> the original Animal Farm animated movie was co-funded by the CIA.

Tons of literature was funded and directed by the CIA beginning in the early 1950s.

The CIA were some of the principal orchestrators of the entire Iowa Writers Workshop program that steered literature away from material concepts and into a more postmodern framework where objectivity was not valued and individualistic feelings were centered.

E. Howard Hunt is not a reliable source.

The rabbit hole runs deep with the historical parallels in this book.

Characters:

• Boxer is the working class, betrayed by the pigs / Stalin. He does everything he's meant to do loyally but they still turn him into glue

• The four "young pigs" who are killed are likely the top soviets killed during Stalin's Great Purge (Bukharin is the only one I remember)

• Mr Jones is Tsar Nicholas

• Mollie, the horse who leaves because she can no longer get ribbons and sugar cubes, represents the Russian aristocracy who fled after the Revolution

• Moses, with his fairytale talk of "sugarcandy mountain" is the Russian Orthodox Church

• Napoleon's pack of dogs are the KGB

• Old Major is Lenin, whose ideals were corrupted by his successor Napoleon (Stalin). As mentioned in another comment, Snowball is Trotsky - driven out for ideological differences and later turned into an enemy of the state

• The neighbouring farms are the Western powers. Frederick is Hitler - a leader who initially seems aligned with the farm but, it turns out, is betraying it (in real life Operation Barbarossa, in the book the fake money). Pilkington is probably Churchill.

• Mr Whymper is a bit harder, but I think likely to be the kind of useful idiots / tankies that helped spread the soviet agenda in Western countries during the Cold War

Events:

• The hens refusing to give up their eggs is the Ukrainian revolt against collectivism

• The windmill represents Stalin's "five year plan", along with its subsequent failure that leads to famine.

• The Order of the Green Banner is the Order of Lenin

• Frederick / Hitler's attack on the farm is the German invasion of Russia in WW2. It's repulsed, bloodily, just like the USSR threw back the Nazis in places like Stalingrad and Leningrad

The only one I never worked out is the cat. She talks about the revolution supportively but doesn't do any work, and is later found to be playing both sides. I'm not sure if she represents a specific person, or a class.

She leaves. She doesn't want to give up her comforts. It mirrors the bourgeoisie, who fled Russia after the Revolution.

1984 imagines an English form of Stalinism. But Animal Farm is a direct allegory of Stalin’s rise to power in Russia.

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