Animal Farm

Animal Farm (full title: Animal Farm: A Fairy Story) is a novella by George Orwell, and is perhaps the most famous satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism. Published in 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era. Orwell, a democratic socialist, and a member of the Independent Labour Party for many years, was a critic of Stalin, and was suspicious of Moscow-directed Stalinism after his experiences with the NKVD during the Spanish Civil War. The novel was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to present) and was number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels.
The plot is an allegory in which animals play the roles of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and overthrow and oust the human owners of the farm, setting it up as a commune in which, at first, all animals are equal; soon disparities start to emerge between the different species or classes. The novel describes how a society's ideologies can be changed and manipulated by individuals in positions of power.
The allegory that the book employs allows it to be read on a variety of different levels. Orwell wrote the book following his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which are described in another of his books, Homage to Catalonia. He intended it to be a strong condemnation of what he saw as the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals.

Characters and their possible real life counterparts
Old major: based upon both Marx and Lenin
Napoleon: Joseph Stalin
Snowball: Leon Trotsky
Squealer: Vyacheslav Molotov
Minimus: is a poetical pig who writes the second and third national anthems of Animal Farm
Pinkeye is a small piglet who tastes Napoleon's food for poisoning.
Piglets are hinted to be the children of Napoleon
Rebel Pigs are pigs who complain about Napoleon's takeover of the farm but are quickly silenced and later executed. The closest parallels to the Rebel Pigs may be Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Grigory Zinoviev , and Lev Kamenev.
Mr. Jones: represents Nicholas II of Russia
Mr. Frederick represents Adolf Hitler
Mr. Pilkington is the easy-going but crafty owner of Foxwood. Represents the western powers, such as Britain and the U.S.
Mr. Whympe : Lincoln Steffens
Boxer, he is the tragic avatar of the working class, or proletariat
Clover is Boxer's mate and a fellow draft horse.
Mollie represents upper-class people
Benjamin is a donkey who is cynical about the Revolution and life in general.
Moses is a tame raven who represents religion
Muriel represents intelligent labour
Hens represent the Kulaks.
Dogs are Napoleon's secret police and bodyguards
Pigeons symbolize Soviet propaganda
Sheep show the blind loyalty of the proletarian
Cat shows the unethical

Writer
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903– 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Noted as a novelist and critic as well as a political and cultural commentator, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century. He is best known for two novels critical of totalitarianism in general, and Stalinism in particular: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both were written and published towards the end of his life.
His Works
During the majority of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and the class divide generally) and Homage to Catalonia. According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."
Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both of them are primarily allegories of the Soviet Union, the former of developments in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution, and the latter of life under Stalinist totalitarianism - although there are elements in Nineteen Eighty-Four which satirize "opium for the masses" that can be found outside the Soviet Union (witness the newspapers filled with "sex, sport, and astrology" which the Ministry of Truth peddles to the proles). Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (which is often considered the inferior of the two); both are powerful dystopian novels of an "imaginary" future of state control, the former bleak and the latter superficially happy.

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