George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm, published in 1945, described his book as an allegorical account of events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Stalinist era of the Soviet Union.
George Orwell was the nom de plum of Eric Blair, a British political novelist and essayist. As a young socialist, he fought in the Spanish Civil War. But in the 1930s, as he became aware of the cruel realities of Soviet dictatorship under Joseph Stalin, Orwell became critical of both capitalism and communism.
The 1945 book Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was conceived as an allegory that used English farm animal characters to describe the evolution of Soviet communism. Certain animals were meant to portray important Russian Communist Party leaders (e.g., the pigs Napoleon and Snowball represented Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, respectively).