Putin the pig: How Animal Farm still holds the key for understanding Russia

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others...so goes the famous quote from George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm. Published on August 17, 1945, just days before the end of the Second World War, it is considered a masterpiece of modern literature.

Devilishly simple yet devastatingly effective, it was written by Orwell (born 1903 as Eric Blair) after returning fromthe Spanish Civil War. He had been horrified by the actions of the Communist Party he had witnessed. Essentially a critique of 1917’s Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era which followed, its antagonists and protagonists are anthropomorphic farm animals; allegorical representations of characters in the Soviet Union such as Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin.

In the book, which Orwell subtitled A Fairy Story, the overworked and underfed animals of Manor Farm, led by the pigs, throw off their capitalist human overlord, rebranding it Animal Farm and remaking it as a socialist utopia. Orwell based the farm on a real one in Wallington, Hertfordshire, which he rented from 1936 to 1947.

“All animals are equal” is one of the seven commandments by which the four-legged comrades govern the farmin a spirit of unity and fairness, where private enterprise is abandoned in favour of collectivisation.

As the story develops, however, greed, laziness and tyranny slowly destroy this bucolic idyll. The porcine liberators consolidate power to become despotic rulers who alter the commandments to favour themselves and seize absolute control.

Hens represent the exploited peasant farmers of Ukraine and other Soviet states, terrorised by the vicious dogs of the military and secret police.

In the end, their rustic revolutionary dream descends into a dark, totalitarian nightmare, the cruel pigs going into business with, and appearing indistinguishable from, the human dictators they’ve replaced – while “less equal” animals are left to suffer an even bleaker life than before.

Political author and journalist Masha Karp describes Animal Farm as “perhaps the most perfect book written in the 20th century”. Having grown up in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), her biography of Orwell was the first to be published in Russian.

A renowned authority on the English novelist and a board member of the Orwell Society whose journal she edits, Masha also worked for the BBC Russian Service between 1991 and 2009. Now living in London, her latest book, George Orwell And Russia, is published by Bloomsbury.

Masha explains: “Under Soviet rule it was forbidden to even mention Orwell’s name.

“But under Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika policies (openness and transparency), censorship was lifted.

“People became very interested in Orwell and I was asked to translate Animal Farm into Russian in 1990.

“It was easy to translate because lots of the slogans and rhetoric used by the pigs in Animal Farm were directly taken from the ones I had grown up hearing Soviet leaders use to govern us!”

During the Cold War, Russian language versions of the book, as well as Orwell’s following dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, had to be printed in the west and smuggled into the USSR. The texts were then re-typed and secretly distributed – a crime that would carry a severe punishment under Soviet rule.

“The authorities were scared of Animal Farm even more than of Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Masha explains. “Stalin was still alive when it was first published and in the book he was depicted as a pig! Nobody was in any doubt as to who all the characters were meant to be – it was absolutely transparent.

“Lower ranking members of the Com-munist Party were too frightened to even mention the book’s name for fear of upsetting Stalin. Ordinary citizens of the USSR loved it, though, because it told the truth: that the revolution had been betrayed.”

Masha finds clear parallels between Putin’s Russia of today and Stalin’s Russia of 1945, as satirised by Orwell.

“One of the main messages of Animal Farm is the way the totalitarian rulers, the pigs, govern by propaganda. They continuously brainwash the population and subtly alter the commandments, or laws, to legitimise their rule,” she continues.

“What has been going on today under Putin is a slow but successful brainwashing of the population.

“He has held on to power for more than 25 years by similarly changing the constitution to suit his needs.

“The propaganda, as in Animal Farm, is reinforced by intimidation. Any desires by the people to change the country are suppressed. Any criticism of the war in Ukraine is punished by long sentences of up to 20 years. It’s like in Stalin’s time.

“It seemed natural that many in the West were horrified by Putin’s actions, both inside and outside the country, but I was shocked to see President Trump supporting Putin in the war with Ukraine.

“It reminded me of the final scene of Animal Farm where the ‘creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig… but… it was impossible to say which was which’.”

Despite its ultimate success – Animal Farm sold 250,000 copies in its first year of release and has since sold more than 11 million worldwide – Orwell had difficulty, at first, finding a publisher for his manuscript. Many would not touch it for political reasons, the British government having formed a wartime alliance with Russia against Nazi Germany.

One publisher, Jonathan Cape, accepted it in 1944 but later declined, after being warned off the book by Peter Smollett, the head of the British Ministry of Information’s Russian section.

A former journalist, Smollett earned an OBE for his services, but was later identified as a Soviet spy who reported to the same handler as Kim Philby.

Remarkably, Orwell had long suspected Smollett of being “some kind of Russian agent” and warned against people like him “worming their way into important propaganda jobs where they [are] probably able to do us a lot of harm”.

Another group of spies which was rather keener on the book was the American Central Intelligence Agency.

Gripped by a Cold War paranoia and mortal fear of Communist expansion, the CIA in 1954 secretly funded a film version of Animal Farm which, made primarily in Stroud in Gloucestershire, was Britain’s first ever feature-length animation.

Scott Anthony, author of the British Film Institute book The Story of British Propaganda Film, explains: “In 1948, a Labour MP called Christopher Mayhew set up an organisation called the Information Research Department (IRD) to fight back against communist propaganda.

“They had already made a comic strip version of Animal Farm for distribution in newspapers around the world including what was left of the British Empire.

“At the same time, across the United States, something similar was happening with various committees and organisations being set up with the same aim. CIA agents negotiated with Sonia Orwell (George’s widow) for the rights to make Animal Farm.

“The story goes that the CIA clinched the deal by arranging for Sonia to meet her idol, Clark Gable.”

Ironically, in the CIA’s film version, the book’s ending is changed – and Orwell’s own message altered – so the pigs (representing Communist Party leaders) are overthrown by the workers, led by a wise-looking donkey who bears more than a passing resemblance to the one on the flag of the US Democratic Party.

“The problem with propaganda,” as Scott puts it, is “that it’s rather like lying: once you start, you just can’t stop.”

Regardless of how it is interpreted, Animal Farm is a book that still resonates strongly today, serving as a constant reminder about the dangers of believing everything you are told, especially by politicians.

Dr Colin Alexander, senior lecturer in Political Communications at Nottingham Trent University, often refers students to Orwell’s body of work, especially Animal Farm, singling the author out as “an important character for our political understanding of the message that the powerful use to maintain their status”.

Dr Alexander says: “What Orwell wanted, as I interpret it, was for people to elevate their own consciousness. Whether it be political, religious or corporate institutions, while they may claim good intent towards people, ultimately they are self-interested entities.

“And Orwell was critical of them, period.

“What he desired was for people to be able to think for themselves, to be media literate, politically literate and to make decisions from the sanctity of their own minds.” Animal Farm, by exposing the self-serving dictators who use propaganda to control and abuse the citizens whom they claim are “equals”, certainly does that.

Masha Karp finds it hard to think of a book (apart from Nineteen Eighty-Four), that is still as relevant, politically, today as it was 80 years ago.

“I feel and lament the absence of Orwell in the West today,” she says. “What Britain is lacking is somebody with a sharp eye for the dangers all around us – whether that is from Russia, elsewhere in the world, or even closer to home.”

● To celebrate the book’s 80th anniversary, The Folio Society has released a new edition of Animal Farm featuring illustrations by Quentin Blake. Available from foliosociety.com