A book I really enjoyed reading is ‘Animal Farm’, written by George Orwell.
It talks about the story of some animals who suffer from being exploited by a farmer, Mr Jones, who is the owner of the Manor Farm. Inspired by the Old Major, a middle white boar, they decide to uprise and eventually conquer the farm. After such an achievement, the animals change the name of the farm from Manor Farm to Animal Farm and establish that everyone is equal and must work to contribute to the sustainment of the others. Anyway, the pigs take the command under a supreme leader, Napoleon, who eliminated his rival Snowball (another pig). The farm, even if the other animals don’t really understand it, degenerates into a sort of totalitarian state.
The whole story is an allegory of the Russian Revolution. For instance, Old Major represents Lenin, Snowball is Trotsky and Napoleon is Stalin. In fact, just as the Soviet Union in the Stalinian era, the farm had become a brutal dictatorship, characterized by a cult of personality and a reign of terror. Orwell was a democratic socialist and a severe critic of Stalinism, and, with this book, he is able to spread his thoughts to a vast audience.
One of the things I liked the most was how Orwell was able to describe the pigs’ lust for power and create a parallelism with men. They exploited the ignorance of the other animals to gain control of the situation, even by telling them contradictory truths and forcing them to believe. We could tell that the whole story is about the progressive transformation of pigs into corrupted beings, who care only about power and not about the other animals.
To sum up, ‘Animal Farm’ is a very interesting book and I recommend it to everyone, but a basic knowledge of the Russian Revolution and of the URSS could help understanding better what’s actually been said.