BRUTAL BEASTS OF THE USSR

Eighty years after George Orwell's biting political satire alerted the world to the horrors of life in the Soviet Union, there are still plenty of lessons to be learned from Animal Farm

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ALL ANIMALS are equal, but some are more equal than others...so goes the famous quote from George Orwell's novella Animal Farm. Published on August 17, 1945, just days after the end of the Second World War, it is considered a masterpiece of modern literature.

Devilishly simple yet devastatingly effective, it was written by Orwell (born 1903 as Eric Blair) after returning from the Spanish Civil War. He had been horrified by the actions of the Communist Party he had witnessed.

Essentially a critique of 1917's Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era which followed, its antagonists and protagonists are anthropomorphic farm animals; allegorical representations of characters in the Soviet Union such as Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin.

In the book, which Orwell subtitled A Fairy Story, the overworked and underfed animals of Manor Farm, led by the pigs, throw off their capitalist human overlord, rebranding it Animal Farm and remaking it as a socialist utopia. Orwell based the farm on a real one in Wallington, Hertfordshire, which he rented from 1936 to 1947.

"All animals are equal" is one of the seven commandments by which the four-legged comrades govern the farm in a spirit of unity and fairness, where private enterprise is abandoned in favour of collectivisation.

As the story develops, however, greed, laziness and tyranny slowly destroy this bucolic idyll. The porcine liberators consolidate power to become despotic rulers who alter the commandments to favour themselves and seize absolute control.

Hens represent the exploited peasant farmers of Ukraine and other Soviet states, terrorised by the vicious dogs of the military and secret police.