this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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For something approachable by liberals, which will be your teacher and classmates, newer works by R. W. Davies will work. He is an actual historian who focuses on primary sources. Reading him will rob the project of its political character, but in many ways that is probably to your benefit on this essay. Unfortunately I am basically recommending you 7 long books and that is probably not practical, but maybe you can skim them and focus on certain parts.
Personally, I was happy to annoy my teachers so I would probably contextualize the USSR as through a cold warrior's view, with Orwell being an anticommunist who betrayed the people around him for being gay, socialist, communist, etc. Animal Farm is not a historical work, it doesn't describe anything real at all, it literally a fiction intended to denigrate communists and the USSR without using one lick of factual material about it.
Animal Farm cannot be contextualized by just the USSR itself because it does not describe the USSR as a character or setting. It only reveals the mind of the author and how they envisioned their own politics as against those of the USSR, with his very limited understanding in both domains. His alignment against the USSR traces the development of the cold war itself, with him adopting others' terms for the (suddenly evil after being a valued ally in WWII), for example, "totalitarian" state. The fact that he tried to get people around him blacklisted through a government contact would never be totalitarian, of course.
Orwell was poorly educated politically and in terms of current events. His characters are a cartoonish fiction that reflects this. So if someone says, "oh that one pig is Stalin", they are much less correct than someone saying, "that pig is how Orwell wants you to think of Stalin". Because the two actually bear no relation to one another. So this is why the best context us actually anticommunist propaganda and it tropes rather than the USSR in reality.
I’ve been really skeptical about this essay from the beginning, Orwell’s books are (like you said) notoriously wrong. What I personally strive for in this is to provide a view less influenced by the west, and breaking down this tyrannical view of the USSR. Anyhoo, thanks for your reply!
Nice! Finding a view separate from the West may be difficult if you want English-language materials, unfortunately. But there are good English language historians skeptical of cold warrior narratives. I don't know why I didn't mention him originally, but you may find Domenico Losurdo very useful for this essay. His book(s) on Stalin will be super relevant as they juxtapose Western propaganda about him and the USSR during the period when Animal Farm was written versus firm historical realities.