In at least 150 words, explain how George Orwell's early life influenced the personal beliefs that were reflected in his writings.

George Orwell wrote the manuscript in 1943 and 1944 subsequent to his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in his 1938 Homage to Catalonia. In the preface of a 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, he explained how escaping the communist purges in Spain taught him "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries." This motivated Orwell to expose and strongly condemn what he saw as the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals.

Immediately prior to his writing, the Ministry of Information had put out a booklet for propagandists with instructions on how to quell ideological fears of the Soviet Union, which included directions to claim that the Red Terror was a figment of Nazi imagination, and Orwell had quit the BBC

Orwell came into direct contact with Stalin’s men while he and his wife were fighting in the 1930s the Spanish Civil War (a proxy war between the communists and the fascists). Orwell, a socialist, went to Spain to fight against the fascist takeover of the country, but he found himself nearly as disturbed by the antidemocratic tendencies of the communists he fought alongside. In the Preface to the Ukrainian edition, Orwell says that his time in Spain made him realize "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries." He set out to write Animal Farm with this idea in mind. He wanted to pull back the curtain on Russia, to reveal the Stalinist version of communism as a brutal farce, a betrayal of the socialist values Orwell held dear. As Orwell said, "it was of the utmost importance that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was" (source).

After seeing a young boy whipping a carthorse, Orwell had the idea to make his story a fable, to link it with proud tradition of Aesop and Jonathan Swift. As he puts it in his Preface, "It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat." The fable form allowed Orwell to depict the Soviet Union in simpler terms, to explain it clearly to common readers and to endow it with his own unique perspective. In short, the Soviet Union became Animal Farm.