Animal farm

            Animal Farm: Satire on Communist Russia.
             Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, is at the surface a simple novel of a group of animals living and working under the oppression of a tyrannical farmer who successfully overthrow him with a plan to live independently which backfires on them and ends them up under the even more dictatorial rule of the pigs. The novel, though, was actually meant by Orwell to be a satire of Russia during its revolutionary period from the Czar Nicholas II to Trotsky and Stalin. "Animal Farm," wrote Orwell, "was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole." Through this essay, the social and political situation presented in George Orwell's Animal Farm will thoroughly be discussed and described.
             HISTORICAL BACKGROUND.
             The Russian Revolution began with the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in 1917. The Government was then taken over in the absence of the Czar by a group of bankers, lawyers, industrialists and capitalists. This group was a very weak leadership and didn't last for long. A political party known as the Bolsheviks, headed by V. I. Lenin, stepped in to take over. The main goal of the Bolsheviks was to set up a government for the proletariat, or working class. The Provisional Government finally fell when thousands of Red Guards(armed workers) stormed the Winter Palace at the signal from the battleship Aurora and overran it, sealing the Provisional Government's fate. Lenin immediately began his attempt to construct a socialist government in Russia according to the philosophy of Karl Marx. After the death of Lenin, the government was taken over by a man named Joseph Stalin, who began the regression back to an oppressive dictatorship. Later on, Leon Trotsky, Stalin's Commissar of War and Chairman of the Supreme Military Council, became his greatest opposition and a dangerous threat to his absolute power due to his superior intelligence and ideas.