Animal Farm

In Animal Farm, Old Major the boar represents both Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, the thinkers and revolutionary leaders who inspired the rise of communism in Russia.

Like Marx, Old Major develops the core ideas that drive the rebellion. He argues that humans profit from the animals’ labor while producing nothing themselves, declaring, “Man is the only real enemy we have.” He urges the animals to unite against oppression and imagine a society in which all animals are equal. His speech becomes the foundation for Animalism, just as Marx’s writings became the ideological basis for communism.

Old Major also resembles Lenin because he inspires the revolution but dies before seeing what his ideas become in practice. After his death, Snowball and Napoleon turn his teachings into a political system, much as Lenin’s successors shaped the Soviet Union after Lenin died. Napoleon later even displays Old Major’s skull for the animals to honor, echoing the way Lenin’s image and memory were treated with near-religious reverence in the USSR.

Old Major represents the idealistic beginning of the revolution before corruption takes over. His vision imagines a world “set free from hunger and the whip, all equal,” but the pigs gradually twist those ideals into a dictatorship. Through Old Major’s character, Orwell suggests that revolutionary ideas may begin with genuine hopes for justice, yet those ideas can be reshaped by leaders who want power for themselves.