George Orwell was a quiet, decent Englishman who passionately hated two things: inequality and political lying. Out of his hatred of inequality came a desire for a society in which class privileges would not exist. This to him was “democratic socialism.” His hatred of political lying and his support for socialism led him to denounce the political lie that what was going on in the Soviet Union had anything to do with socialism. As long as people equated the Soviet Union with socialism, he felt, no one could appreciate what democratic socialism might be like.
And so, he says, he “thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages.” That story was Animal Farm, and it has been translated into many other languages. Understanding Orwell’s political convictions- and how they developed- will greatly enrich your reading of Animal Farm.
He was born Eric Blair- he took the name George Orwell many years later- in
1903, in India. His father was an important British civil servant in that country, which was then part of the British Empire. He retired on a modest pension and moved back to England a few years after Eric was born. Thus the family was part of the “lower upper-middle-classes,” as Orwell was to say: people in the English upper classes who weren’t rich, but who felt they should live as the upper classes traditionally did. That’s why, when Eric was eight, the Blairs sent him away to
boarding school to prepare for Eton, an exclusive prep school. Eric had a scholarship, and yet his father still ended up spending almost a quarter of his pension to send his son to that boarding school! From his parents’ point of view, the sacrifice paid off: Eric won a scholarship to Eton. From the boy’s point of view, it meant that in a ferociously snobbish, class-conscious world, he twice had the humiliating experience of being the poorest boy in the school. “In a world where the prime necessities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes... I was no good,” he wrote years later, in a powerful essay on his school experiences called “Such, Such Were the Joys.” In his first school, he was repeatedly beaten with a cane for being “no good” in various ways. And he was made to feel ashamed for “living off the bounty” of the headmaster-owner, that is, for having a scholarship. From the age of eight to eighteen, the boy learned a lot about inequality and oppression in British schools.
He graduated from Eton at eighteen, near the bottom of his class. There was no chance of a scholarship to Oxford, so Eric followed in his father’s footsteps and passed the Empire’s Civil Service Examination. As a member of the Imperial Police in British-ruled Burma, he was to see inequality and oppression from another point of view- from the top. The fact that he was a part of that top intensified the feelings of distance and anger that he already had toward his own class. After five years in Burma he resigned.
When he came back to Europe in 1927, he lived for more than a year in Paris, writing novels and short stories that nobody published. When his money ran out, he had to find work as a teacher, a private tutor, and even as a dishwasher. He was poor- but of his own choice. His family could have sent him the money to get back to England and find a better job than dishwashing in a Paris hotel. Perhaps he was too proud to ask for help. But there was another, deeper reason: he felt guilty for the job he had done in Burma- for having been part of an oppressive government. He saw his years of poverty as punishment- and as a way to understand the problems of the oppressed and helpless by becoming one of them.
By 1933 he had come up from the bottom enough to write a book about it:
Down and Out in Paris and London. Probably to save his family embarrassment, Eric asked that the book be published under a pen name. He suggested a few to his publisher. One of them was the name of a river he loved: Orwell. The next year, “George Orwell” published Burmese Days, a sad, angry novel about his experiences there. Two more novels followed.
In 1936 came another significant experience in Orwell’s life. His publisher sent him to the English coal-mining country to write about it. Here he again saw poverty close up- not the “picturesque” poverty of Paris streets and English tramps, but the dreary poverty of tough men killing themselves in the dark mines day after day, or- worse still- hungry and out of work. He wrote a powerful piece of first-hand reporting about what he saw there: The Road to Wigan Pier.
Afterwards, Orwell described himself as “pro-Socialist,” yet he was often bitterly critical of British socialists. To refuse to “join” his own side, to insist instead on telling the unpleasant truth as he saw it, was to become an Orwell trademark.
In 1937, however, Orwell did join a side he believed in, and it almost cost him his life: he volunteered to fight for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.
Fascism was rising in Europe: Mussolini had taken power in Italy, Hitler in Germany. In Spain, where a shaky democratic Republic had recently been born, a socialist government was elected, promising land reform, voting reform, and separation of Church and State. A group of right-wing generals led by Francisco Franco revolted against the Republic with their armies. The government was forced to arm factory workers to defend itself against the armies- and a long, bloody civil war began.
Three experiences were crucial for Orwell in the Spanish Civil War. The first was what he saw when he got there. In Barcelona, Orwell found an exhilarating atmosphere of “comradeship and respect,” everyone addressing each other as “comrade,” treating each other as equals. The same thing was true, he said, of the militia group he joined. Orwell believed he was seeing the success of socialism in action.
The second thing that marked Orwell was what happened to his fellow fighters. They were jailed and shot- not by Franco, but by their own “comrades,” Communist-dominated elements of the same Republican government they were fighting for! The Communists disagreed with some of the views of the militia group Orwell belonged to; they suspected the men of being disloyal to Commu-
nist ideas. Luckily for Orwell, he was not rounded up with his fellow soldiers. He had been shot through the throat on the front lines and was shipped back to England for treatment.
The third experience that would stay with Orwell for the rest of his life was what happened when he returned to England and reported what he had seen.
None of the socialists wanted to hear it; nobody believed it. He was an eyewitness? No matter. It was not the right time to say something that might hurt the Republican side. So Orwell had seen the socialist ideal in action, and he had seen it crushednot by its natural enemies on the Right, but by Communists on the Left. And he had seen the infuriating incapacity of the Left, even the non-Communist Left, to accept that truth. All of this was very much on his mind when, in the middle of World War II, he resigned his job on the BBC (the Army wouldn’t take him because of his bad lungs) and began writing Animal Farm, in November 1943.
Once again it looked like the wrong time for a story to “expose the Soviet myth.” The Soviet Union was Britain’s ally in the war against Nazi Germany.
And in fact four publishers would turn down Animal Farm. But what was “the Soviet myth”? Why did enlightened, humane people not want to believe ill of the Soviet Union? To see what Animal Farm is about, we must look at what happened in Russia, and what it meant for people who were in many ways Orwell’s political friends.
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Ideas play a part in any revolution, but the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917- the one that changed “Russia” into the “U.S.S.R.”- was noteworthy for being principally inspired by one idea. It was a revolution consciously made in the name of one class (the working class, the “proletariat”) and against another class (the owners, the “bourgeoisie”). The Revolution was made by men who believed with Karl Marx that the whole history of the world was the history of a struggle between classes- between oppressors and oppressed.
Marx, like other socialist thinkers of the 19th century, denounced the cruel injustices of industrial capitalist society as he saw it. He had a vision of ending “the exploitation of man by man” and establishing a classless society, in which all people would be equal. The only means to this end, he thought, was a revolution of the exploited (the proletariat) against the exploiters (the bourgeoisie), so that workers would own the means of production, such as the factories and machinery. This revolution would set up a “dictatorship of the proletariat” to do away with the old bourgeois order (the capitalist system) and eventually replace it with a classless society.
Lenin took this idea and further focused on the role of the Communist Party as the leader of the working class.
When Lenin reached Russia in 1917 a first revolution against the crumbling regime of the Czar had already taken place. The new government was democratic, but “bourgeois.” Lenin victoriously headed the radical socialist (Bolshevik) revolution in October of that year. This was immediately followed by four years of bloody civil war: the Revolution’s Red Army, organized and led by Leon Trotsky, had to defeat the “Whites” (Russians loyal to the Czar or just hostile to the Communists) and foreign troops, too.
At Lenin’s death in 1924, there was a struggle between Joseph Stalin and Trotsky for leadership of the Communist Party and thus of the nation. In 1925, Stalin clearly gained the upper hand; in 1927, he was able to expel Trotsky from the Party. Later Trotsky was exiled, then deported, and finally assassinated in Mexico, probably by a Stalinist agent, in 1940. All this time, Stalin never stopped denouncing Trotsky as a traitor.
Power in the Soviet Union became increasingly concentrated in Stalin’s hands. In the 1930s, massive arrests and a series of public trials not only eliminated all possible opposition, but loyal Bolsheviks and hundreds of thousands of other absolutely innocent Russians.
Still, people all over the world who felt the pull of Marx’s ideal- an end to exploitation and oppression, as they saw it- thought of the Soviet Union as the country of the Revolution. It was hard for many people on the Left (who think of themselves as on the side of the exploited, and want major changes in society to attain social justice) to give up this loyalty. That’s one reason why Orwell wrote Animal Farm.