Since there are distinct political parallels in the allegorical Animal Farm, it is essential for students to have a working knowledge of the major people and events in the Russian Revolution and the years that followed it. A list of specific parallels is contained on this disk.

The capitalist system was flourishing in Europe and America in the mid-1800s, but the profits of businesses were generated at the expense of workers who laboured 14 to 18 hours a day under unsafe conditions. There were no child labour laws, and wages were barely livable.

In 1847, an international workers' group asked a German philosopher, Karl Marx, to draw up a plan for their organization. The group was called the Communist League, and its purpose was to unite the working classes of Europe. Marx wrote The Manifesto of the Communist Party. It has been said that Marx was actually a socialist, and that the Communism which developed later bore little resemblance to his "Manifesto".

Marx foresaw a workers' revolt followed by a kind of paradise where each person would work according to his or her ability and receive according to his or her need. Marx saw, as the final stage of this historical determinism, worldwide economic equality.

Laws made conditions in Western Europe and America more tolerable for workers, and the world-wide revolution never came to pass. Instead, the socialist party split into two factions. The moderate faction advocated bringing about changes through legislation. The other group adhered to Marx's idea of revolution.

Russia was being poorly mismanaged by a Czarist government, and most of the Russian people were still underpaid labourers on land owned by wealthy landlords. Communists were a small extremist group within the Russian socialist movement. Leon Trotsky, a socialist revolutionary, was forced to flee Russia twice because of his anti-Czarist activities. In 1917, the Bolshevik Party, led by Nikoli Lenin, successfully overthrew Czar Nicholas II, and the Communist Party gained control of the government. Trotsky, who believed terrorism was a valuable method for suppressing counter-revolutionaries, returned to take a prominent position in the government.

At Lenin's death, there was a power struggle between Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. Stalin gained control in 1926, and Trotsky went to Mexico, but was later assassinated. Stalin deported to Siberia all those who did not agree with him. His secret police also used arbitrary arrests, torture, and mass executions to maintain his dictatorship. Anyone could be a victim of these purges for no apparent reason.

The idealism of the Revolution had turned into a system no less terrifying than rule by the Czars. There was no freedom in the new system, which was based on military bureaucracy. Forced labour created wealth for the few while their own conditions changed little of grew worse. Terrorist police prevented uprisings.