Animal Farm

An Allegory of the Russian Revolution

ALLEGORY:

• A work (book, play, movie, etc.) in which the characters and events represent other things, as well as a deeper symbolic (often moral or political) meaning

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

Economy

• The production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services

(How stuff and work gets made/happens, moved around, and used up)

Communism—a Utopia

• A utopia (Greek for “no place”)=an ideal—a place where everything is perfect and everyone is happy

• Communism—an idea of a utopia based on the principal of equality and sharing—everybody works, everybody shares

• --”From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”

Russian Peasants--feudalism

St. Petersburg, 1917

Tsar Nicholas II & Family

Vladimir Lenin—the Bolsheviks

Socialism

• A system of government where the state controls the means of production (the ways stuff gets made) and distribution (who gets the stuff and how)

Leon Trotsky & Joseph Stalin