what is the historical context of animal farm by george orwell?

Orwell subtitled Animal Farm “A Fairy Story.” Characters in fairy tales tend to be two-dimensional stereotypes used to reveal some broad observation about life. As the critic C.M. Wodehouse wrote in a piece on Animal Farm in 1954, a fairy tale has no moral. It simply says, “Life is like that—take it or leave it.” Animal Farm uses the format of a fairy tale to expose the evils of totalitarian exploitation. Rather than attack totalitarianism directly, the book shows its offenses plainly and clearly and lets the reader deduce the dangers posed by totalitarian governments. The literary work most often mentioned alongside Animal Farm is 1984, another Orwell novel. 1984, published in 1949, envisions a future in which a dictatorship monitors and controls the actions of all of its citizens. Like Animal Farm, 1984 depicted the horrific constraints that totalitarian governments could impose on human freedom.

Related Historical Events: In 1917, two successive revolutions rocked Russia and the world. The first revolution overthrew the Russian Monarchy (the Tsar) and the second established the USSR, the world’s first Communist state. Over the next thirty years the Soviet government descended into a totalitarian regime that used and manipulated socialist ideas of equality among the working class to oppress its people and maintain power. Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian Revolution and the Communist Soviet Union. Many of the animal characters in Animal Farm have direct correlations to figures or institutions in the Soviet Union.