Animal Farm is a beast fable, in the form of a satirical allegorical novella, by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. It tells the story of a group of anthropomorphic farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed and, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon, the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before.
The Russian Revolution was a period of political and social change in the Russian Empire, starting in 1917. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a socialist form of government following two successive revolutions and a bloody civil war. The Russian Revolution can also be seen as the precursor for the other European revolutions that occurred during or in the aftermath of World War I, such as the German Revolution of 1918–1919.
The Great Purge, or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to consolidate his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet state. The purges also sought to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky. The term great purge, an allusion to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror.
The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification was a Spanish communist party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War. It was formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain and the Workers and Peasants' Bloc against the will of Leon Trotsky, with whom the former broke.
Ramón Mercader, was a Spanish Communist and NKVD secret agent who assassinated the revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940. Mercader was imprisoned for 19 years and 8 months in Mexico for murdering the exiled Trotsky with an ice axe.
Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat.
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, nicknamed the Red Napoleon, was a Soviet general who was prominent between 1918 and 1937 as a military officer and theoretician. He was later executed during the show trials of 1936-38.
George Orwell's 1945 allegorical novel Animal Farm contains various anthems adopted by the eponymous farm, most notably the original anthem "Beasts of England" and its later replacement "Comrade Napoleon".
Boxer is a character from George Orwell's 1945 novel Animal Farm. He is shown as the farm's dedicated and loyal laborer. Boxer serves as an allegory for the Russian working-class who helped to oust Tsar Nicholas and establish the Soviet Union, but were eventually betrayed by the government under Joseph Stalin.
Squealer is a fictional character, a pig, in George Orwell's 1945 novel Animal Farm. He serves as second-in-command to Napoleon and is the farm's minister of propaganda. He is described in the book as an effective and very convincing orator and a fat porker. In the 1954 film, he is a pink pig, whereas in the 1999 film, he is a Tamworth pig who wears a monocle.
Major is the first major character described by George Orwell in his 1945 novel Animal Farm. An elderly Middle White boar, his "purebred" of pigs is a kind, grandfatherly philosopher of change.
Mr. Jones of Manor Farm is a fictional character in George Orwell's 1945 allegorical novel Animal Farm. Jones is an allegory for Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Jones is overthrown by the animals of his farm, who represent Bolshevik and liberal revolutionaries.
Animal Farm is a 1954 adult animated drama film directed by documentarians John Halas and Joy Batchelor. It was produced by Halas and Batchelor and funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who also made changes to the original script. Based on the 1945 novel of the same name by George Orwell, Maurice Denham provides the voice for all the animals in the film.
Benjamin is a donkey in George Orwell's 1945 novel Animal Farm. He is also the oldest of all the animals. He is less straightforward than most characters in the novel, and a number of interpretations have been put forward to which social class he represents as regards to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. Benjamin also represents the old people of historical Russia because he remembers the old laws that have been changed.
Animal Farm is a 1999 political comedy-drama television film directed by John Stephenson and written by Alan Janes. Based on the 1945 novel of the same name by George Orwell and serving as an allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the film features an ensemble cast including Kelsey Grammer, Ian Holm, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patrick Stewart, Julia Ormond, Paul Scofield, Charles Dale, Pete Postlethwaite, Alan Stanford and Peter Ustinov. In the film, a group of anthropomorphic animals revolt successfully against their human owner, only to slide into a more brutal tyranny among themselves.
Snowball's Chance is a parody and unofficial sequel to George Orwell's Animal Farm written by John Reed, in which Snowball the pig returns to the Manor Farm after many years' absence, to install capitalism — which proves to have its own pitfalls.
In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, Emmanuel Goldstein is the principal enemy of the state of Oceania. The political propaganda of The Party portrays Goldstein as the leader of The Brotherhood, a secret, counter-revolutionary organization who violently oppose the leadership of Big Brother and the Ingsoc régime of The Party.
Napoleon is a fictional character and the main antagonist of George Orwell's 1945 novel Animal Farm. While he is at first a common farm pig, he exiles Snowball, another pig, who is his rival for power, and then takes advantage of the animals' uprising against their masters to eventually become the tyrannical "President" of Animal Farm, which he turns into a dictatorship, eventually becoming every bit as openly cruel as its original human owner and being perceived as physically indistinguishable from a human at the very end of the story.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian state in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.
The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against "Trotskyists" and members of the "Right Opposition" of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
- The "Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center" ;
- The "Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center" ; and
- The "Case of the Anti-Soviet 'Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites'".
