CMV: Animal Farm is not a good book, nor is it a good anti-totalitarianism allegory

I want to preface this by saying that I enjoy George Orwell's writing and I consider him a great journalist and social critic. I also think there are some good aspects to Animal Farm, particularly the crisp prose style and the perceptive wit, and that they presage the (far greater) achievement of 1984.

However, I don't think Animal Farm is a classic, or that the general view of the book is accurate to its contents. There are going to be spoilers for the entire plot here, of course.

I first read Animal Farm at the age of 13 in school. It was taught to me as an anti-communist satire but also as an age-old parable about the betrayal of idealism by tyranny and corruption. My teacher taught the book as a fable about how easily the ideals of a revolution are lost.

Obviously on one level the book is a direct allegory for the Russian Revolution as Old Major (Karl Marx) formulates the ideals of the revolution and stirs up the working classes, before Snowball (representing Trotsky, perhaps with some of Lenin too) and Napoleon (representing Stalin) carry out the revolution and win control for the animals (the workers). Napoleon and his cabal then betray Snowball, driving him out to a mysterious fate (mirroring the assassination of Trotsky), before taking control of the farm and systematically betraying Old Major's ideals.

What intrigues me is the notion that this is supposed to be a general condemnation of authoritarianism, communism, and other revolutionary movements that seem to offer all the answers but just replace one exploitative class with another. I vividly recall my teacher asking the class, 'if Snowball had won, do you think the situation would have ended up any differently?' The answer she was expecting was, of course, 'no', which I think accords with the message most people take from the book - absolute power corrupts absolutely, and both of the pig-tyrants were walking down a path that would eventually lead to the oppression of the people they claimed to care about. Interestingly, Orwell supposedly affirmed this perspective in a letter to his friend, the anarchist writer George Woodcock, towards the end of his life (though I cannot find the original source), saying 'Trotsky-Snowball was potentially as big a villain as Stalin-Napoleon'.

The problem is that none of this is in the book.

Seriously, I could not, and still cannot, find a single instance in the book in which Snowball is depicted as anything but intelligent, industrious, rhetorically brilliant, and acting in the animals' best interests. He is brave in fighting off Mr Frederick (the neighbouring farm owner, a clear analogue for the Nazis), he never betrays Old Major's principles, and he is constantly seeking ways to improve life for the other animals, for example by planning to build a windmill and setting up literacy classes for the animals' self-improvement. His only flaw is that he is not as good at Napoleon at organising supporters to disrupt his rival's meetings, which seems more like a positive trait to me; at worst it ascribes a certain naivete to him. It's not until Snowball is exiled that the first of Old Major's Seven Commandments is covertly changed. The corruption of the revolution's ideals only begins with his forced departure. If Orwell really wanted to illustrate that Snowball was potentially also a villain (and I doubt this was actually his intention), I feel that he simply failed to convey this message.

I also find a number of the other allegories in the book troublesome. Orwell seems genuinely scathing of Mollie, the mare who is too attached to her creature comforts of ribbons and sugar cubes than to the revolution. Her unwillingness to part with her private property is depicted as vanity, selfishness, and a contemptible lack of interest in helping the revolution. Perhaps she should have just worked harder and died like Boxer! The portrayal of Moses the raven, who preaches to the other animals about a 'Sugarcandy Mountain' in the afterlife, is surely supposed to be a critical allegory for organised religion, illustrating religious leaders promising eternal rewards after death in order to keep people reconciled to their poor living conditions in the here-and-now, rather akin to Marx's 'religion is the opiate of the people.' I am not particularly religious but I found this puerile and unworthy of Orwell. 'Sugarcandy Mountain' is far from the way religious people characterise belief in the afterlife, sounding a lot more like a sneering atheist mocking the religious for believing in 'sky daddy', and besides, many religious institutions do plentiful charitable work to improve the here-and-now. Orwell even depicts Moses as a willing co-conspirator in Napoleon's oppression of the other animals, presumably an allegory to Stalin's 1941 lifting of the anti-Orthodox campaigns and reopening of churches. But, even though the worst abuses of Soviet anti-religious persecution (such as the genocidal deportations of Chechen Muslims) had yet to take place, the essentially state-atheist nature of the Stalinist regime, the mass arrests of clergy and persecution of people for attending church were all very obvious by the time Animal Farm was written. It's also rather ironic that religion played such a large part in the eventual collapse of the Soviet regime, something which, going on this book alone, Orwell would never have predicted.

All in all, I don't get the impression that Orwell was actually writing a parable about how power always corrupts. It feels a lot more like he was making a trite factional point about different types of communism in post-Revolution Russia, the undercurrent of which is that there was nothing unwise about the revolution's goals, that Stalin was the only real problem (which would accord with Orwell's own experiences during the Spanish Civil War), and that things would indeed have turned out alright if only Trotsky had won. This seems historically dubious given the attested facts of Trotsky's brutal repression of the Kronstadt uprising, and it also damages the book's moral weight as a blanket condemnation of the rule of the many by an elitist few.

I will award deltas to anyone who can either point out a flaw in my understanding of the allegory, or can make a persuasive case that the book is a deserved classic despite these problems.