"Some animals are more equal than others"

During the famine of 1921 through 1922 in the Volga region of the new Soviet Russia, over 5 million peasants died. During this devastation, which resulted from the civil war and Bolshevik policies, children were the first to suffer. Stalin learned to use starvation as a weapon. During the 1933 famine in Ukraine, the Russian wheat belt, the goal was to collectivize the farms. His suppression of revolts in the peasantry over his state-sponsored confiscation of private property inflicted death for over 6 million Ukrainians. Dead bodies lay in the streets, ignored by an indifferent population, numbed by the genocidal catastrophe. Cannibalism was so rampant that the government printed posters that read, "Eating your children is an act of barbarism".

Before the world even knew Adolph Hitler, over 11 million Russians had died as a result of a socialistic philosophy enforced by the strong arm of the state. Besides murdering their own people, the Soviets were also experts at hiding the truth of their rule from adoring syncophants around the world. One such romantic was a gifted writer:

George Orwell, the nom de plume of Erich Arthur Blair, was an English writer in various genres, but he is best known for two of his books, Animal Farm (published in 1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (published in 1949).

Born in India to English parents, Blair described his upbringing as "lower-upper-middle-class". His father, Richard, worked in the Indian Civil Service.

In studying, analyzing, or reviewing any artistic endeavor, it is important, if even remotely possible, to learn the motivation of the artist. This is true for any art form, be it music, painting, sculpting, or writing. Blair did us a favor by writing on this subject in his essay Why I Write:

“First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

A proponent for socialism, Blair had wanted to write for the ‘common man’ and purposefully lived as a tramp in London and the Home Counties and stayed with miners in the north. Blair learned of the disparity between the classes and came to know a life of poverty and hardship amongst beggars and thieves. His study of the under-classes in general would provide the theme for many of his works to follow.

(Taken from http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/)

In this idealistic fervor, Blair, with his new wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, headed for Spain to fight the fascist Generalissimo Franco. Fighting with Russian-backed NKVD, Blair naively thought that all Russians were on the same page. In Spain, he learned differently. Shot in the throat, but surviving his wounds, he claimed that as a Trotsky-ite, he was shot by a Stalinist. Many of his friends were not as fortunate, meeting violent ends at the hands of Stalin's assassins. This obviously did not sit well with him. Nevertheless, he and his wife barely survived to get back to England to recover from his injuries with a new set of loyalties as World War II began.

At the beginning of the war, Eileen worked in the Censorship Department in London, and Blair just wrote. With his adventures in Spain still fresh on his mind, he wrote Animal Farm. English publishers, with Soviet sympathizers in their midst, delayed publication of the book until 1945 after the war was over. These sympathizers were afraid to offend the Russians.

Four years later, in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. A year later, Blair was dead, after a three year bout with tuberculosis. He was 46, but what he wrote still resonates today.