George Orwell and A Brief History of Russia About the Author Although George Orwell requested that no biography be written about him, most of his work is autobiographical and grew out of his experiences. From his writings and the reminiscences of his friends, enough information has been gathered to help the reader understand Orwell and therefore his writings. He was born Eric High Blair in India in 1903, the middle child of a minor government official. At eight, he was sent to an expensive prep school in England, but he was accepted at a reduced tuition rate, and this caused him to be treated as a sort of "charity case" by his snobbish peers. This marked his life with a constant sense of failure, and a conviction that the rich and strong made the world's rules. These feelings caused him to identify with the underdog and sympathize with victims of poverty. He won a scholarship at Eton, and did well there, but rather than attending a university after graduation he joined the Indian Imperial Police. He doubted the merits of imperialism, which made his job in Burma unpleasant. He resigned after five years and went to Paris to write. During this time (1927-1932), he wrote Burmese Days, The Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier. In 1936, Orwell went to Spain to write newspaper articles about the Spanish Civil War, but instead he joined the anti-Franco militia, backed by Trotsky-ite Communists. He was wounded severely, and was discharged from the hospital just in time to escape from the country. The Communists had outlawed the militia in which Orwell had served. Disillusioned with Communism, Orwell concluded that all revolutions fail because those who attain power are corrupted by it, a theme that permeated his writing. When he returned to England, Orwell and his wife lived in a small village where they kept chickens, geese, and goats, and grew vegetables and fruits. His friends recall that he had a great sense of responsibility for the well-being of animals, and was especially fond of horses. It may be that Orwell saw in nature the only true "Utopian state" possible, and that he felt 20th-centry man's move away from the land was a mistake. Orwell's health prevented him from serving in the Second World War, but he joined the Home Guard and worked for the BBC. During this time the British Ministry of Information sent out a directive to BBC news broadcasters to play up the virtues of Bolshevism. (Russia was an Allied power during the war.) Animal Farm was written during the closing years of the war, and was finally published in 1945. It had been rejected by four publishers because of its theme. Publication of the book was timely, because it was just at this point that the true
aims and methods of the Russian Communists were beginning to come to light. Orwell's health continues to fail. He produced one more book, 1984, and then died in 1950. It is generally agreed that Orwell's purpose in writing Animal Farm was to warn the world about the dangers of totalitarianism as well as to satirize the mentality of the revolutionary who believes Utopia is possible. From his own experiences, Orwell developed his thesis: Power inevitably corrupts, and therefore revolutions inevitably fail their purpose. New masters are necessarily corrupted by new power. A vicious circle is set up: ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY. Orwell was strongly influenced by Jonathon Swift, who used his Houyhnhms and Yahoos as political symbols in Gulliver’s Travels, and by Charles Dickens, who had the optimistic hope that things would turn out all right if people could just learn to treat one another decently. Another important influence was Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, also about the dangers of totalitarianism. Animal Farm includes many of the same elements, telling much the same story in a different way.
A Brief History of Communism in Russia Since there are distinct political parallels in the allegorical Animal Farm, it is essential for students to have a working knowledge of the major people and events in the Russian Revolution and the years that followed it. A list of specific parallels will be given later. The capitalist system was flourishing in Europe and America in the mid-1800s, but the profits of businesses were generated at the expense of workers who labored 14 to 18 hours a day under unsafe conditions. There were no child labor laws, and wages were barely livable. In 1847, an international workers' group asked a German philosopher, Karl Marx, to draw up a plan for their organization. The group was called the Communist League, and its purpose was to unite the working classes of Europe. Marx wrote The Manifesto of the Communist Party. It has been said that Marx was actually a socialist, and that the Communism which developed later bore little resemblance to his Manifesto. Marx foresaw a worker’s revolt followed by a kind of paradise where each person would work according to his or her ability and receive according to his or her need. Marx saw, as the final stage of his historical determinism, worldwide economic equality.
Laws made conditions in Western Europe and America more tolerable for works, and the world-wide revolution never came to pass. Instead, the socialist part split into two factions. The moderate faction advocated bringing about changes through legislation. The other group adhered to Marx’s idea of revolution. Russia was being poorly mismanaged by a Czarist government, and most of the Russian people were still underpaid laborers on land owned by wealthy landlords. Communists were a small extremist group within the Russian socialist movement. Leon Trotsky, a socialist revolutionary, was forced to flee Russia twice because of his anti-Czarist activities. IN 1917, the Bolshevik Party, led by Nikolai Lenin, successfully overthrew Czar Nicholas II, and the Communist Party gained control of the government. Trotsky, who believed terrorism as a valuable method for suppressing counter-revolutionaries, returned to take a prominent position in the government. At Lenin’s death, there was a power struggle between Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. Stalin gained control in 1926, and Trotsky went to Mexico, but was later assassinated. Stalin deported to Siberia all those who did not agree with him. His secret police also used arbitrary arrests, torture, and mass executions to maintain his dictatorship. Anyone could be a victim of these purges for not apparent reason. The idealism of the Revolution had turned into a system no less terrifying than rule by the Czars. There was no freedom in the new system, which was based on military bureaucracy. Forced labor created wealth for the few while their own conditions changed little or grew worse. Terrorist police prevented uprisings. The aim of totalitarianism is to make people less and less conscious, less able to make distinctions between truth and falsehood, and unable to draw logical conclusions. This is exactly what happens to the animal-workers in Animal Farm. The farm itself stands for Russia, and the characters and plot line all symbolize various people and events in the Russian Revolution. Censorship and propaganda are essential methods of controlling the proletariat and convincing them that they are on the right path while those in other political systems are fools. These are important tools used by the pigs in Animal Farm as well.