On August 17, 1945—just two days after V-J Day in Asia and fewer than two weeks after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—George Orwell published what he modestly called his “little squib”: Animal Farm. It was a 30,000-word bombshell that detonated on the cultural front with an impact of atomic proportions. It marked the first major literary salvo of the Cold War and initiated the serious unraveling of the Soviet myth in the Western imagination.
Orwell had long nurtured the idea of a “beast fable” in the tradition of Aesop and La Fontaine—and, more recently, Anatole France’s Penguin Island (1908)—to expose the betrayal of the Russian Revolution. He wrote that the idea struck him when he observed a young boy leading a massive plough horse and wondered what might happen if animals realized their strength and revolted. Thus began the allegorical vision of a revolution gone wrong.
This animal revolution drives the humans from the farm and its feudal-type tyranny (“Manor Farm”) in which humans oppress animals. Under the leadership of the pigs, the animals overthrow the human dictatorship and soon successfully defend their newly christened Animal Farm when the humans launch a counterattack.
Napoleon (Stalin) proposes to build an animal “workers’ state,” a proletarian-governed farm where a just constitution founded on the seven “commandments” of “Animalism” would (purportedly) guarantee rule by law. The two most significant commandments are: “Four legs good, two legs bad” and “All animals are equal.” With Napoleon and Snowball (Trotsky) working together, it briefly seems as if Animal Farm is a utopia. Yet Napoleon is already plotting Snowball’s ouster and a total takeover of power; as time passes, he and his pig followers transform Animal Farm into an oppressive regime. They subvert and rewrite the commandments of Animalism, the revolution curdles into a reign of terror, and the would-be proletarian paradise degenerates into despotism.
Orwell began writing his “little squib” while working at the BBC in 1943 and finished the next year. He didn’t show it at first to anyone other than his wife Eileen, who often regaled her friends with updates of the tale. The story closely parallels the events of the Russian Revolution: Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks, the emergence of Stalin, the five-year plan, the role of the secret police and the party trials, all in the guise of animals. Orwell’s ending, which echoes the Big Three meeting at Teheran in November 1943, presciently forecasts the post–World War II political betrayals, as it indicts both the Soviets and the West. Napoleon and Pilkington both play the ace of spades; moreover, the Russians are no better than the Western Allies, for the pigs now resemble humans and behave just as badly (if not far worse) than their human “friends.” By the end of this “animallegory,” the pigs resemble the humans they replaced, prompting Orwell’s chilling conclusion: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man … but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Orwell had trouble finding a publisher in England: “Uncle Joe” and the Russians were still valued in official circles as anti-Nazi allies as the war wound down; furthermore, communism was popular in intellectual and publishing circles throughout 1945. In England, Animal Farm was rejected by four major publishers, including by T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, who wrote Orwell that the message of the fable represented “simply one of negation.” What is needed, he said, was not a rebellion or rejection of pig-rule, but rather “more public-spirited pigs,” one of the great misreadings of all time. Eventually a small house, Secker and Warburg, published the tale.
Upon its release, Animal Farm gained plaudits from both conservatives and the liberal-left. The fable was a hit in England, with even the Queen Consort (the wife of George VI) wanting a copy. (In a delicious irony that the socialist patriot Orwell must have relished, as the fable’s first edition was selling out, she had to dispatch Her Majesty’s equerry to a radical anti-royalist bookshop to secure a copy.)
Animal Farm was a spectacular success, both commercially and with the critics, when it reached American shores in August 1946, becoming a runaway bestseller. In the next decade, it became a staple of American high school English classrooms. Recognizing the lineage of Animal Farm in the tradition of the beast fable, literary critic Edmund Wilson termed it a “masterpiece.” Pointing to an English-language predecessor, Wilson compared it favorably to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—one of Orwell’s cherished books ever since his schooldays at Eton—as an ingenious satire. Wilson, doyen of the American literary elite, anointed Orwell’s “little squib” as nothing less than a contemporary classic, accurately predicting that Orwell would soon emerge “as one of the ablest and most interesting writers that the English have produced.”
The Book of the Month Club named Animal Farm its September 1946 special selection. This BoMC edition sold more than half a million copies in the next two years. The earnings from those sales made Orwell rich and famous. Orthodox Stalinists were stunned and outraged by the fable’s critique of not only the Russian Revolution but also the main tenets of communism: the collectivist ethos whereby both political and economic power are concentrated in a ruling elite. Orwell’s denunciation of communism as a corrupted idealism received lavish praise in the pages of Henry Luce’s flagship anti-communist magazines, Time and Life, then at the height of their worldwide influence. Luce and Reader’s Digest (which also excerpted portions of the fable) promoted Animal Farm in the emerging culture war internationally.
Meanwhile, America’s left-wing establishment—dominated by Soviet fellow-travelers such as the intellectuals at both The New Republic (TNR) and The Nation—condemned Orwell and the fable, branding it vulgar propaganda. They were still supporters of Stalin throughout the 1940s and had followed every twist and turn of the Communist Party line since the early 1930s. For instance, George Soule, writing in TNR, derided Animal Farm as an incompetent parody of the Russian Revolution, “creaking” and “clumsy.” He also managed to confuse the main characters, thinking Napoleon was supposed to be Lenin (rather than Stalin). He saw no parallel in the events that characterized the revolution. Isaac Rosenfeld, a respected member of the New York intellectuals who (like Orwell) wrote for Partisan Review yet still an adherent to Stalinist party-line edicts, also denied that Orwell’s interpretation had any validity to the events of the revolution. Rosenfeld argued that Orwell didn’t tell readers anything they didn’t already know about events in Russia. (A decade later, he would change his mind and laud Orwell’s intellectual integrity and clear-sighted political vision.)
Both of us (Rodden and Rossi) first read Animal Farm as the Cold War still raged, more than a half-century ago. As boyhood readers, we were excited to catch on to the allegorical references in Orwell’s “fairy story” (his subtitle in the first edition), to see how an apparent barnyard tale was not just “an animal story” (as the editor of Dial Press foolishly dismissed it in his rejection letter to Orwell), but instead was really about raging geopolitical matters.
Like so many other readers, we were fascinated that the book was an allegory with precise correspondences between Russian history and every fictional event and literary character. In later years, we both taught the book to high school and college students. When I (Rodden) realized that many junior and senior high school teachers did not know much about Russian history, I wrote a high school textbook about the complex historical context of the allegory.
Orwell’s tale of corrupted ideals remains acutely relevant to today’s political landscape, and far beyond the borders of the author’s native England. Social justice movements often find themselves grappling with the same issues Orwell satirized: power, hierarchy, betrayal of principles, and the manipulation of language.
For instance, animal rights groups such as Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) have embraced Animal Farm’s message in their campaigns against the exploitation of animals and the corporate-state alliance that enables it. WIRED magazine has reported that their protests, which have been regularly surveilled and infiltrated by the FBI, were deemed by government agents as designed to arouse citizen action by spreading “Orwellian paranoia.”
Moreover, critiques of “woke capitalism” and performative activism today often cite Orwell’s most memorable line: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The co-opting of egalitarian language by corporations and governments has made Animal Farm more relevant than ever.
Modern satire frequently channels Orwellian themes. The Juice Media, an Australian organization known for their “Honest Government Ads,” produce biting critiques of governmental hypocrisy, echoing the doublespeak and gaslighting techniques Orwell ridiculed in Squealer. Editorial cartoons and political memes worldwide use the image of pigs in suits to critique political elites, referencing the same symbolism Orwell deployed to warn about political betrayal and moral corruption.
And during the COVID-19 pandemic, some groups—both on the left and the right—invoked Orwell to protest public health mandates, claiming that the constant revision of rules mirrored Animal Farm’s ever-changing commandments.
Animal Farm has also been frequently invoked in recent years when issues of global politics and censorship arise. For instance, Western commentators have often described the Chinese Communist Party in terms echoing Napoleon and the pigs. Notably, references to the book are regularly scrubbed from mainland Chinese social media. Freedom House reports that this censorship is conducted with special vigor during politically sensitive times, because Beijing perceives Orwell’s allegory as subversive and threatening to its image of historical legitimacy.
In Africa, too, Animal Farm has run afoul of authoritarian leaders. Ugandan officials have banned the novel in schools for its political content, which they claim undermines respect for authority, reflecting the very dynamic Orwell warned against: censorship as a means of consolidating power. The influence of Animal Farm is also evident in African literature. Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory (2022) is a clear homage, using talking animals to critique dictatorship and propaganda in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.
In the U.S., Animal Farm’s popularity also endures. It is still found on the syllabi of high school courses in literature and in some college literature classes. My daughter’s 8th grade class [Rossi] reads and analyzes it every spring. For years, I [Rodden] taught the fable in a university survey literature course entitled From Utopia to Anti-Utopia, which covered works ranging from Plato’s Republic to Orwell’s 1984 and Marge Piercy’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
The satirical barbs and clever slogans of Animal Farm have been part of political discourse ever since its original publication. The fable’s coinages were widely quoted during the early Cold War era to attack Stalinism and the USSR—and also by communists and fellow travelers to attack McCarthyism and “Red Scare”-era investigations of on “un-American” protesters during the 1950s and ’60s. In the 1970s, during the Watergate scandal that rocked the Nixon White House and resulted in impeachment proceedings against the president, his circle of advisers was widely compared by the American and British media to the elite pigs surrounding Napoleon.
In the 21st century, Animal Farm has proven to be an equal-opportunity satirical goldmine of jibes targeted at leaders from both parties.
The Biden-era Democrats have been frequently associated in the conservative press with double standards and Squealer-like propaganda. As one USA Today columnist expressed it in April 2025:
In Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” It’s hard not to conclude that Democrats and the news media look at Americans in the same way…. For the left, Americans are equal, but the most equal Americans are the unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who fund diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a LGBTQ+ comic book in foreign countries.
Animal Farm has also featured prominently in liberal and mainstream press critiques of the Trump administration. Even more so than during his first presidential term, Trump is regularly referred to as the leader of a “pig state.” Both American and European critics of Trump compare his populist rhetoric, centralization of power, and public vilification of opponents to the actions of Napoleon in dealing with his political opponents. For instance, The Observer wrote this year that Trump’s “drain the swamp” mantra was akin to Napoleon’s pseudo-revolutionary sloganeering and that his Cabinet appointees and press secretary behave like Orwell’s Squealer: They are expert manipulators of narrative. Or as an op-ed writer for the Saint Louis University News contends in his March 2025 column, “Fictitious Fascism or Frightening Reality? Warnings from George Orwell’s Animal Farm,” just as Napoleon (Stalin) stole the ideas of Snowball (Trotsky)—including the building of the windmill (= the Five-Year Plan), so too does Donald Trump pilfer Democratic programs and then call them his own.
In Animal Farm, Napoleon did none of the work, then took credit for all achievements completed by the farm animals. Trump has often taken credit for policies initiated by former President Barack Obama…. I have often heard Trump supporters echo false claims made by Trump, which reflects a similar mindset held by the uneducated, successfully propagandized farm animals in Animal Farm: “It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, ‘Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days.’”
“Four score” after its publication, Animal Farm has sold more than 25 million copies. It is recognized as both as a classic of contemporary world literature and as bracing, evergreen political warning about oligarchy and corruption. Whether read as an historical allegory of the USSR, a cautionary tale about the perils of populism, or a mirror reflecting psychopolitics and “human” nature, Animal Farm is as urgent and illuminating as ever.
Little squib, big warning? Yes. Orwell’s central message remains timeless: Ideals are fragile, revolutions are volatile, and power corrupts. Whether or not animals can act like humans, human beings are ever-prone to behave like beasts.
