Throughout his career, Orwell explored how politicians manipulate language in an age of mass media. In Animal Farm, the silver-tongued pig Squealer abuses language to justify Napoleon’s actions and policies to the proletariat by whatever means seem necessary.

Narrator Animal Farm is the only work by Orwell in which the author does not appear conspicuously as a narrator or major character; it is the least overtly personal of all of his writings. The anonymous narrator of the story is almost a nonentity, notable for no individual idiosyncrasies or biases.

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Books of the day – Animal Farm". The Guardian. 24 August 1945. Archived from the original on 30 July 2016 . Retrieved 17 July 2016. Bynum, Helen (2012). Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis. Oxford University Press. p.xiii. ISBN 978-0-19954205-5.

Major then provides a precept that will allow the animals to determine who their comrades are: creatures that walk on two legs are enemies; those with four legs or with wings are allies. He reminds his audience that the ways of man are completely corrupt: once the humans have been defeated, the animals must never The pigs play the role of the intelligentsia, who organized and controlled the Russian Revolution. Squealer creates propaganda similar to that spread by revolutionaries via official organs such as the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. Moses embodies the Russian Orthodox Church, weakening the peasants’ sense of revolutionary outrage by promising a utopia in the afterlife; the beer-soaked bread that Mr. Jones feeds him represents the bribes with which the Romanov dynasty (in which Nicholas II was the last tsar) manipulated the church elders. Mollie represents the self-centered bourgeoisie: she devotes herself to the most likely suppliers of luxuries and comfort.Peter Edgerly Firchow and Peter Davison contend that the Battle of the Windmill, specifically referencing the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Moscow, represents World War II. [25] [26] During the battle, Orwell first wrote, "All the animals, including Napoleon" took cover. Orwell had the publisher alter this to "All the animals except Napoleon" in recognition of Stalin's decision to remain in Moscow during the German advance. [76] Orwell requested the change after he met Józef Czapski in Paris in March 1945. Czapski, a survivor of the Katyn Massacre and an opponent of the Soviet regime, told Orwell, as Orwell wrote to Arthur Koestler, that it had been "the character [and] greatness of Stalin" that saved Russia from the German invasion. [f] Front row (left to right): Rykov, Skrypnyk, and Stalin– 'When Snowball comes to the crucial points in his speeches he is drowned out by the sheep (Ch. V), just as in the party Congress in 1927 [above], at Stalin's instigation 'pleas for the opposition were drowned in the continual, hysterically intolerant uproar from the floor'. ( Isaac Deutscher [77]) The animals achieve a bountiful harvest, hold meetings to discuss the communal good, and create committees. Though the animals become somewhat literate, Snowball reduces the seven commandments to one maxim: “four legs good, two legs bad.” Tensions begin to rise after Napoleon takes Jessie and Bluebell’s puppies to care after himself, and when the animals discover that the pigs have been taking all the milk and apples. Because the elite class controls the dissemination of information on Animal Farm, it is able to hide the terrible truth of its exploitation of the other animals. Fallible individual memories of Snowball’s bravery and Napoleon’s cowardice at the Battle of the Cowshed prove no match for the collective, officially sponsored memory that Squealer constructs, which paints a picture indicating completely the reverse. With no historical, political, or military resources at their command, the common animals have no choice but to go along with the charade. Clover– A gentle, caring mare, who shows concern, especially for Boxer, who often pushes himself too hard. Clover can read all the letters of the alphabet, but cannot "put words together".

According to Orwell, Animal Farm reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, a period of time when Russia lived under the communist ideology made by Joseph Stalin. [1] [4] Orwell, a democratic socialist, [5] was a critic of Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude that was critically shaped by his experiences during the Barcelona May Days conflicts between the POUM and Stalinist forces during the Spanish Civil War. [6] [a] In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as a satirical tale against Stalin (" un conte satirique contre Staline"), [7] and in his essay " Why I Write" (1946), wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole". [8]The struggle for preeminence between Leon Trotsky and Stalin emerges in the rivalry between the pigs Snowball and Napoleon. In both the historical and fictional cases, the idealistic but politically less powerful figure (Trotsky and Snowball) is expelled from the revolutionary state by the malicious and violent usurper of power (Stalin and Napoleon). The purges and show trials with which Stalin eliminated his enemies and solidified his political base find expression in Animal Farm as the false confessions and executions of animals whom Napoleon distrusts following the collapse of the windmill. Stalin’s tyrannical rule and eventual abandonment of the founding principles of the Russian Revolution are represented by the pigs’ turn to violent government and the adoption of human traits and behaviors, the trappings of their original oppressors.