Animal Farm: Stalin And Napoleon

The novel Animal Farm, by George Orwell, was an allegory about the Russian Revolution in which the author used a farm and it’s members to symbolize major characters and their actions. In this composition, I will reveal to you many of Joseph Stalin’ s important contributions and how they relate to the actions of Napoleon from Animal Farm. I will break this topic down into the following three parts, their rise to power, Stalin’s Five Year Plan, and their use and abuse of authority.

When Lenin died in 1924, a struggle for power began between Trotsky (Snowball) and Stalin (Napoleon). Trotsky was a brilliant individual, but Stalin was just a simple person whose power was based on allegiances with other members of the communist party rather than on ideas. This is contrary to how Snowball was the more intelligent one of the two and all the sheep and pigs were loyal to Napoleon. Trotsky believed in Russia’s trying to spread communism all over the world as Snowball’s purpose with animalism and Stalin was more focused on the prosperity of Russia, as was Napoleon about the wellness of the farm. By 1929, Stalin had gathered enough resources to exile Trotsky from Russia just as Napoleon did to Snowball.

Stalin believed that Russia was one hundred years behind the west. He devised his Five Year Plan to bring Russia up to speed with the rest of the world. This plan included many of Trotsky’s ideas, which Stalin had previously opposed. We can relate this to the building of the windmill in Animal Farm and how Napoleon was against the idea until after the expulsion of Snowball. Russia’s economy was centralized on agriculture with over twenty five million farms. Unfortunately, the majority of these barely produced enough to feed the families of those who worked them. Farmers who had a surplus of produce were called kulaks. Stalin decided he would "liquidate the kulaks as a class" under collective agriculture. He believed that once the population of "those just getting by" saw the benefits that they would receive from these state-run farms, they would immediately approve, and that’s just what they did. Unfortunately for Stalin, the kulaks did not like this idea. In protest, they destroyed their livestock and tools and burned their crops or let them rot in the fields. This event is displayed in Animal Farm when Napoleon decides to sell the chickens' eggs for the benefit of the farm.