eventy-five years ago today, “a little squib” contributed decisively to changing American attitudes toward the Soviet Union—our ally during the Second World War—and so to launching the Cold War. That sharp-edged squib was Animal Farm, a 30,000-word satire in the tradition of Aesop’s beast fables. The author who modestly described his own work as such was British writer Eric Blair (1903-50), better known by his pen name, George Orwell, and most famous for his next and last novel, 1984.
On August 26, 1946—exactly 12 months after American planes dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war in the Pacific—Orwell’s fable detonated on American shores, a literary nuclear weapon. Its impact on the cultural front of the Cold War proved immediate and lasting: never again would the American public speak warmly about the Soviet dictator “Uncle Joe” Stalin and his tyrannical regime.
I first read Animal Farm as the Cold War still raged, more than a half-century ago. As a boy, I was excited, as Orwell’s “fairy story” (his British subtitle) unfolded, to become aware that this barnyard tale was about geopolitical matters of much greater scope than the cruelty of a farmer toward his animals—or of pigs toward so-called “lower” animals, the beasts of burden such as the heroic cart horse, Boxer. I discovered in a state of anxious wonder that the tyrannical pigs represent the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that the diabolical pig leader Napoleon stands in for Joseph Stalin and that his eloquent rival Snowball represents Trotsky, and on and on.
