Following is an excerpt from a letter from George Orwell to
Dwight Macdonald, written in December 1946, soon after the publication of
Animal Farm in the US. According to the editor of the letters, Peter Davison,
who also supplied the footnotes, Macdonald wrote Orwell that
anti-Stalinist intellectuals of his acquaintance claimed that the parable of Animal Farm meant that revolution always ended badly for the underdog, “hence to hell with it and hail the status quo.” He himself read the book as applying solely to Russia and not making any larger statement about the philosophy of revolution. “I’ve been impressed with how many leftists I know make this criticism quite independently of each other—impressed because it didn’t occur to me when reading the book and still doesn’t seem correct to me. Which view would you say comes closer to you own intentions?”
Orwell’s reply will appear in George Orwell: Life in
Letters, to be published by Liveright in August.
Re. your query about Animal Farm. Of course I intended it
primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a
wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent
conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only
lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only
effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck
out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point
of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for
themselves (Kronstadt).1 If the other animals had had the sense to put their
foot down then, it would have been all right. If people think I am defending
the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and
assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire
capitalism. In the case of Trotskyists, there is the added complication that
they feel responsible for events in the USSR up to about 1926 and have to
assume that a sudden degeneration took place about that date. Whereas I think
the whole process was foreseeable—and was foreseen by a few people, eg. Bertrand
Russell—from the very nature of the Bolshevik party. What I was trying to say
was, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no
such thing as a benevolent dictat[or]ship.2
Copyright © George Orwell. First American Edition 2013.
1
Kronstadt, a naval base guarding the approach to St.
Petersburg, a few miles from Finland, was established by Peter the Great in
1704. The turning point in Animal Farm is related to events that took place
there early in 1921. Food shortages and a harsh regime prompted a series of
strikes in Leningrad; in March the strikers were supported by sailors at the
Kronstadt naval base. This was the first serious uprising not only by
supporters of the Revolution against their government but by a city and by
naval personnel particularly associated with ensuring the success of the 1917
Revolution. Trotsky and Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937) put down the
rebellion, but the losses sustained by the rebels were not in vain. A New
Economic Policy was enunciated shortly after which recognized the need for
reforms. Tukhachevsky was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935, but two
years later he was executed in one of Stalin’s purges. The fact that Macdonald
missed the significance of the “turning-point” in Animal Farm may be the reason
why Orwell strengthened this moment in his adaptation for radio, the script of
which he was to deliver in a week or so. He added this little exchange:
CLOVER: Do you think that it is quite fair to appropriate
the apples?
MOLLY: What, keep all the apples for themselves?
MURIEL: Aren’t we to have any?
COW: I thought they were to be shared out equally.
Unfortunately, Rayner Heppenstall cut these from the script
as broadcast. ↩
2
When Yvonne Davet wrote to Orwell on September 6, 1946, she
told him that the title initially chosen for the French translation of Animal
Farm was to be URSA—Union des Républiques Socialistes Animales (=URSA, the
Bear) but it was changed “to avoid offending the Stalinists too much, which I
think is a pity.” ↩
