Animal Farm by George Orwell, is a classic cautionary tale published in 1945, exploring how power can corrupt. It is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and its subsequent betrayal by Joseph Stalin. A group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution. Concluding that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", the pigs form a dictatorship even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters.
Nicholas IIBorn May 6, 1868, St. Petersburg, Russia—died July 16/17, 1918, the last Russian emperor (1894–1917), who, with his wife, Alexandra, and their children, was killed by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution |
Vladimir Ilich LeninBorn April 10 1870, Simbirsk, Russia—died January 21, 1924, founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect, builder, and first head (1917–24) of the Soviet state. |
Joseph StalinBorn December 18, 1879, Gori, Georgia, died March 5, 1953, Moscow - secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–53) and premier of the Soviet state (1941–53), who for a quarter of a century dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union and transformed it into a major world power. |
Karl MarxBorn May 5, 1818, Trier, Prussia [Germany]—died March 14, 1883, London, England) - revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist. He published "The Communist Manifesto (1848), the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. |
Leon TrotskyBorn November 7 1879, Yanovka, Ukraine —died August 21, 1940, Mexico) - communist theorist and agitator, a leader in Russia’s October Revolution in 1917, and later commissar of foreign affairs and of war in the Soviet Union (1917–24). |
