Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Wonderful thoughts are running through your mind. Now that you are president, leader of these citizens, you can finally turn things around. Everything would have been better, but now you have total control, all going towards your own well being. All the things you were going to do to help the community won’t happen. Now, anything that offends you must be destroyed. The corruption of power is exactly what the pigs have done to the farm in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. When too much power goes in to the wrong hands, what ever good intentions may have been there are gone and everything is worse than before.

The ideas of the Russian Revolution are clearly represented through the characters and events of Animal Farm. In the beginning of the novel Old Major and his idea of animalism, the thinking that every animal is equal, represent Karl Marx with his design of communism. When Mr. Jones, portraying Czar Nicholas II, is removed from the farm, Squealer, Napoleon, and Snowball, representing Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, take the idea of communism into full perspective. In the novel, Napoleon takes complete control of the farm, eliminating Snowball from the equation just as Trotsky was deported from Russia. All the characters have a role to play on the farm, just as the people did in the Russian Revolution.

Power is a thing everyone enjoys having but when all control has been turned over to one person, the human instinct takes over. After the people have no control, everything goes corrupt. Just like Napoleon, who’s main purpose was to make all animals equal, absolute power ruins the principle of communism. Once everyone is equal, nobody is equal. While Czar Nicholas II was removed and all the peasants were alike, a greater wealth had come into play. The power over a relationship, a community, a nation, is what has become the biggest threat.

In the beginning, Animal Farm was a great idea, a chance to get revenge against the humans and to have everything the way that was convenient to the animals. The Russian Revolution was played out to a similar plot, the idea of communism turned into absolute power. Having absolute power will corrupt a nation, sending everything good plummeting to the ground.