‘Animal Farm’ Never Gets Old: Orwell’s classic turns 80. (Cathy Young, Sep 26, 2025, The Bulwark)
The Soviet parallels in the novel, in which animals on a farm run by the drunk and abusive Mr. Jones band together to drive out their two-legged oppressors and set out to build a haven of freedom and equality for all beasts, are very explicit—right down to specific characters, events, and symbols. Napoleon, the crafty boar who eventually becomes Animal Farm’s totalitarian dictator with a personality cult, clearly represents Stalin; his rival Snowball, who co-leads the revolution but gets outmaneuvered, forced into exile, and branded a traitor—and blamed for everything that goes wrong on the farm—is Trotsky with trotters. (Early on, there’s also a Marx-Lenin mashup: Old Major, the wise boar who inspires the revolt before dying and has his skull reverentially displayed on a post, much like Lenin’s mummified body in the mausoleum in Red Square.) The farm’s flag—a white hoof and horn on a green field—echoes the red flag with the hammer and sickle. Like the early Soviet revolutionaries, the animals throw themselves into enthusiastic labor to make their experiment work, and normal practices turn into political projects: “the Egg Production Committee for the hens,” “the Clean Tails League for the cows,” and “the Whiter Wool Movement for the sheep.”
Soon, the resemblances turn much darker. In an episode that clearly echoes the Holodomor, the mostly man-made famine Stalin used to break the back of peasant resistance to collectivization (and crush Ukrainian nationalism), hens who resist orders to surrender their eggs for trading are starved into submission. Later, the purges and show trials begin. As the assembled animals watch in horror, four pigs who had criticized Napoleon earlier are dragged before him by his pack of trained hounds, confess to treasonous collaboration with Snowball, and are at once dispatched by the same dogs. […]
But in 2025, Americans may be reading this novel with somewhat different eyes than in times gone by, when strongman rule, cult-like worship of leaders, and reality-denying propaganda were things that happened somewhere else. Today, it’s hard to read Orwell’s mordant description of the extravagant panegyrics to Napoleon (“two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!’”) and not think of the examples we are witnessing daily—from the downright idolatrous sensibility common among Trump’s base to administration officials falling all over each other to heap praise on Trump at a cabinet meeting, or a member of Congress telling reporters Trump is “never wrong,” or press secretary Karoline Leavitt gushing, “Cracker Barrel is a great American company, and they made a great decision to Trust in Trump!” Likewise, when Orwell wryly notes that the animals “had nothing to go upon except Squealer’s lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better,” one can’t help thinking of Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner who wouldn’t deliver that message.
The rewriting of slogans, the insidious conspiracies invoked to explain anything that goes wrong, the propaganda chief convincing the other animals that things they saw with their own eyes didn’t happen or happened very differently: The parallels are all over the place.
While the normals keep the aspidistra flying…