Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  The name Snowball recalls Trotsky's white hair and beard and the fact that he melted before Stalin's opposition. Snowball is a brilliant speaker, sometimes unintelligible to the masses but always eloquent and impressive, more vivacious and inventive than Napoleon, and a much greater writer. He is also intellectual and energetic. For as Deutscher writes of Trotsky in 1921, besides running the army and serving on the Politbureau, “He was busy with a host of other assignments each of which would have made a full-time job for any man of less vitality and ability. He led, for instance, the Society of the Godless…. He was at this time Russia's chief intellectual inspirer and leading literary critic. He frequently addressed audiences.”18 Orwell's description of Snowball's activities, though comic, is close to reality: “Snowball also busied himself with organising the other animals into what he called Animal Committees…. He formed the Egg Production Committee for the hens, the Clean Tails League for the Cows, the Wild Comrades Re-education Committee … and various others, besides instituting classes in reading and writing” (27). Snowball studies military history, organizes, commands and leads the Army to victory in the Battle of the Cowshed (the Civil War) when foreign powers help Mr. Jones and invade the farm (Russia). After the War he “was full of plans for innovations and improvements” (41).

  Two of the most important battles between Trotsky and Stalin are allegorized in the novel. Trotsky advocated manufacturing over agricultural priorities and fought for accelerated industrialization, and his ideas for the expansion of the Socialist sector of the economy were eventually adopted by Stalin in the first five-year plan of 1928 (which called for collectivization and industrialization): “Snowball conjured up pictures of fantastic machines which would do their work for them while they grazed at their ease in the fields … so much labour would be saved that the animals would only need to work three days a week” (42–43).19 Stalin wanted comprehensive and drastic collectivization of private farms: Napoleon “argued that the great need of the moment was to increase food production, and that if they wasted time on the windmill they would all starve to death” (43).

  The central ideological issue between Stalin and Trotsky concerned the theory of “Socialism in One Country” against the idea of “Permanent Revolution.” Deutscher writes that “two rival and quasi-Messianic beliefs seemed pitted against one another: Trotskyism with its faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat of the West; and Stalinism with its glorification of Russia's socialist destiny.”20 Orwell presents this controversy in simpler but entirely accurate words: “According to Napoleon, what the animals must do was to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them. According to Snowball, they must send out more and more pigeons and stir up rebellion among the animals on the other farms. The one argued that if they could not defend themselves they were bound to be conquered, the other argued that if rebellions happened everywhere they would have no need to defend themselves” (44).

  When Snowball comes to the crucial points in his speeches, “It was noticed that [the sheep] were especially liable to break into ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’” (41), just as in the party Congress in 1927, at Stalin's instigation, “pleas for the opposition were drowned in the continual, hysterically intolerant uproar from the floor.”21 The Trotsky-Stalin conflict reached a crucial point in mid-1927 after Britain broke diplomatic relations with Russia and ruined Stalin's hopes for an agreement between Soviet and British trade unions; the Russian ambassador to Poland was assassinated; and Chiang Kai-shek massacred the Chinese Communists who had joined him at Stalin's orders. Trotsky and the Opposition issued a declaration attacking Stalin for these failures, but before they could bring this before the party Congress and remove Stalin from power, he expelled Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev from the Party.22 Orwell writes of this vital moment in Soviet history, which signaled the final defeat of Trotsky, “by the time he [Snowball] had finished speaking, there was no doubt as to the way the vote would go. But just at this moment,” Napoleon's dogs (the GPU or Secret Police) attack Snowball and force him to flee the farm and go into exile (45).

  Orwell is not primarily interested in the practical or ideological merits of these controversies, for he believed (wrongly, I think) that both men had betrayed the revolution. He told a friend “that Trotsky-Snowball was potentially as big a villain as Stalin-Napoleon, although he was Napoleon's victim. The first note of corruption was struck when the pigs secretly had the cows’ milk added to their own mash and Snowball consented to this first act of inequity.”23 He wrote in 1939, the year before Trotsky's murder, “It is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind.”

  The three main Russian political events that are most extensively allegorized in Animal Farm are the disastrous results of Stalin's forced collectivization (1929–33), the Great Purge Trials (1936–38) and his diplomacy with Germany that terminated with Hitler's invasion in 1941. Orwell writes that “after Snowball's expulsion, the animals were somewhat surprised to hear Napoleon announce that the windmill was to be built after all” (49). The first demolition of the windmill, which Napoleon blames on Snowball, is the failure of the first five-year plan. The destructive methods of the hens during the “Kronstadt Rebellion”—they “made a determined effort to thwart Napoleon's wishes. Their method was to fly up to the rafters and there lay their eggs, which smashed to pieces on the floor” (65)—are precisely those used by the muzhiks in 1929 to protest against the forced collectivization of their farms: “In desperation they slaughtered their cattle, smashed implements, and burned crops. This was the muzhiks’ great Luddite-like rebellion.”24 The result of this enormous ruin was, as Orwell writes in a 1938 review of Eugene Lyons’ book on Russia, “years of appalling hardship, culminating in the Ukraine famine of 1933, in which a number estimated at not less than three million people starved to death.” Deutscher mentions the recurrent cannibalism during times of starvation.25 Orwell refers to this famine when he writes that “For days at a time the animals had nothing to eat…. Starvation seemed to stare them in the face…. It was being put about that all the animals were dying of famine and disease … and had resorted to cannibalism and infanticide” (63).

  The most dramatic and emotional event of the thirties was the Great Purge Trials, the minute details of which were published in the official translation in 1938. Stalin's motive, according to the editors of the trial's transcript, was a craving “to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that he did not yet possess in 1934.”26 They also state, “What unfolds before us in the trial, then, is a gigantic texture of fantasy into which bits and pieces of falsified real history have been woven along with outright fiction.”27 A perfect example of this is when the animals “remembered that at the critical moment of the battle Snowball had turned to flee” but forgot that it was a deliberate ruse to set up the victorious ambush (69). In the trial of Trotsky's friend, Karl Radek, in February 1937, the Prosecution claimed Trotsky “was organizing and directing industrial sabotage in the Soviet Union, catastrophes in coal mines, factories, and on the railways, mass poisonings of Soviet workers, and repeated attempts on the lives of Stalin and other members of the Politbureau.”28 After the destruction of the windmill, Napoleon roars: “In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year…. A rumour went around that Snowball had after all contrived to introduce poison into Napoleon's food” (60, 90). In the last and most important trial of Bukharin in March 1938, Gorky's secretary, Kryuchkov, confessed, “I arranged long walks for Alexei Maximovich, I was always arranging bonfires. The smoke of the bonfire naturally affected Gorky's weak lungs.”29 During the purge in Animal
Farm, two other sheep confessed to having murdered an old ram, an especially devoted follower of Napoleon, by chasing him round and round a bonfire when he was suffering from a cough (71).30

  In his review of Lyons’ book, Orwell is horrified by the fact that “the GPU are everywhere, everyone lives in constant terror of denunciation…. There are periodical waves of terror … [and] monstrous state trials at which people who have been in prison for months or years are suddenly dragged forth to make incredible confessions.” In Animal Farm, hens “stated that Snowball had appeared to them in a dream and incited them to disobey Napoleon's orders…. Then a sheep confessed to having urinated in the drinking pool [Napoleon had urinated on Snowball's plan during their dispute]—urged to do this, so she said, by Snowball” (71). Tucker and Cohen state that nine million people were arrested during the purges and that the number of people executed has been reliably estimated “at three million.”31 In Animal Farm, all the “guilty” animals are “slain on the spot” and the most terrifying moment of the satire comes after the confessions and executions, when “there was a pile of corpses lying before Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood” (71–72).

  After solidifying his domestic power through massive liquidation, Stalin turned his attention to the increasing menace in Europe, and attempted to play off the democracies against Hitler. Deutscher describes how “he still kept his front doors open for the British and the French and confined the contact with the Germans to the back stairs…. It is still impossible to say confidently to which part of the game Stalin then attached the greatest importance: to the plot acted on the stage or to the subtle counter-plot which he was spinning in the twilight of the coulisse.”32

  Similarly, the animals “were struck dumb with surprise when Napoleon announced that he had sold the pile of timber to Frederick…. Throughout the whole period of his seeming friendship with Pilkington, Napoleon had really been in secret agreement with Frederick” (82–83). But Napoleon is sadly deceived: Frederick's bank notes (the Hitler-Stalin nonagression pact of 1939) are forgeries, and he attacks Animal Farm without warning and destroys the windmill. Orwell's letter to his publisher in 1945 gives a fascinating insight into the precision of his allegorical technique: “In chapter VIII (I think it is Chapter VIII), when the windmill is blown up, I wrote ‘all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces.’ I would like to alter it to ‘all the animals except Napoleon.’ If the book has been printed it's not worth bothering about, but I just thought the alteration would be fair to Joseph Stalin, as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance.” Hitler's defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad (January 1943) was the turning point of the Russian campaign: when the enemy “saw that they were in danger of being surrounded, Frederick shouted to his men to get out while the going was good, and the next moment the cowardly enemy was running for dear life” (87).

  Orwell also portrays one of Stalin's diplomatic blunders. The reappearance of the raven Moses “after an absence of several years” (97) and his eternal talk about the Sugarcandy Mountain represents Stalin's queer attempt, in the spring of 1944, “at reconciliation with the Pope.” In order to gain Catholic support for his Polish policy, he received a lowly and unaccredited American priest, Father Orlemanski, and “was twice closeted with him for long hours” during a most crucial period of the war. Nothing came of this, of course, and the result of this stunt, writes Deutscher, was that Stalin was made “the laughing-stock of the world.”33

  The satire concludes, as Orwell says in the Preface, with “the Teheran Conference, which was taking place while I was writing.” Deutscher, who knew him, relates that Orwell was “unshakably convinced that Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world, and to divide it for good, among themselves, and to subjugate it in common…. 'they are all power-hungry’, he used to repeat.”34 The disagreement between the allies and the beginning of the cold war is symbolized when Napoleon and Pilkington, both suspicious, “played an ace of spades simultaneously” (118). The point of the conclusion is not merely that the pigs are like men, but that men are like pigs.35

  The political allegory of Animal Farm, whether specific or general, detailed or allusive, is pervasive, thorough and accurate, and the brilliance of the book becomes much clearer when the satiric allegory is compared to the political actuality. Critics who write “it makes a delightful children's story”36 and who emphasize that “the gaiety in his nature had completely taken charge”37 do Orwell a serious disservice by ignoring the depth and complexity of his satire. Orwell wrote to Middleton Murry the year he finished the book, “I consider that willingness to criticise Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty,” and by his own or any standard it is an honest and even a courageous book.

  In its own subtle and compressed manner Animal Farm is as serious as Nostromo, whose theme it shares. In Conrad's novel Dr. Monygham states of the capitalistic revolutionaries: “They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle. The time approaches when all that . . [it] stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years back.”38 And Emilia Gould murmurs with deep grief: “There was something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.”39

  THIRTEEN

  THE EVOLUTION OF NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

  In this essay I argued forcefully against the prevailing critical opinion that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a “nightmare vision” of a totalitarian future. I believe, instead, that it is a realistic portrayal of the present and the past. Czeslaw Milosz has testified to Orwell's acute perception of contemporary totalitarianism.

  I published this piece in English Miscellany, edited in Rome by Mario Praz. One day in Rome, when all the museums were closed, I visited Praz's flat, crammed with art, in the Fondazione Primoli. Short and heavy, with slightly Mongol eyes and dilated nostrils, he impressed me as an immensely learned man (only Donald Greene, of the people I've met, equaled his erudition), not without vanity, who had read everything and knew everything—and had very nearly written about everything.

  The most common cliché of Orwell criticism is that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a “nightmare vision” of future totalitarianism.1 I believe, on the contrary, that it is a very concrete and naturalistic portrayal of the present and the past, and that its great originality results more from a realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials than from any prophetic or imaginary speculations. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not only a paradigm of the history of Europe for the previous twenty years, but also a culmination of all the characteristic beliefs and ideas expressed in Orwell's works from the Depression to the cold war. The origins of the novel can be found in Orwell's earliest books, and its major themes, precise symbols and specific passages can be traced very exactly throughout his writings. For example, Orwell characteristically expresses the poverty and isolation that oppresses the characters in his novels in terms of personal humiliation, so that Winston's frustrating sexual experience with his wife Katharine (who is frigid like Elizabeth in Burmese Days and Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter) is exactly like that of Gordon with Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

  Orwell felt that he had to evolve a new literary technique in order to frighten people into a recognition of the dangers that threatened their very existence. His statements about Nineteen Eighty-Four reveal that the novel, though set in a future time, is realistic rather than fantastic, and deliberately intensifies the actuality of the present. Orwell wrote that Nineteen Eighty-Four “is a novel about the future—that is, it is in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel … [it is] intended as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable, and which have already been partly realised in Communism and fascism…. Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of inte
llectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”2 Irving Howe (and the “nightmare” critics who follow him) asserts, “it is extremely important to note that the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not totalitarianism as we know it, but totalitarianism after its world triumph.”3 It would be more accurate to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays the very real though unfamiliar political terrorism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia transposed upon the landscape of London in 1941–44.4