This is a book I've been meaning to read for ages but never got around to - last week I not only read it but gave a lesson on the historical context for the grade 8 class, who will be reading this book andThe Wave. As I found, out of the class of 24, about 20 of them had already read the book, and at least one kid knew it was an allegory of the Russian Revolution. Still, my lesson wasn't totally redundant :)For anyone who isn't familiar with the story,Animal Farmis about the animals on a farm in England rising up against the incompetent, cruel farmer (Mr Jones,who represents the deposed Tsar, Nicholas II) and taking over the farm, renaming it Animal Farm (USSR) and - sothe glorious vision intended - running it for themselves, so their lives would be better.The vision is given to them by a pig, Old Major, who dies not long afterwards. Old Major probably represents Vladimir Leninand Karl Marx, and it's not the socialist ideal put forward that is critiqued by this book but how that vision is corrupted by certain other characters, namely another pig called Napoleon, who represents Joseph Stalin. Napoleon chases a pig called Snowball (Leon Trotsky) off the farm with his personally trained dogs (while still just the General Secretary of the Party, Stalin recruited people who would follow him blindly, so that when Lenin died in 1924 he was able to defeat Trotsky for the leadership position and his "dogs" kept everyone else in line).
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