English — Animal Farm Background (2/3): What Was Stalinism?

Animal Farm Background — Part 2 of 3. A short English-language episode for high school students reading Orwell’s Animal Farm in school. No plot spoilers.

To understand why Orwell wrote Animal Farm, you need to understand the system he was attacking: Stalinism. This episode is a fast crash course in twentieth-century totalitarianism. We start with the difference between an ordinary dictator (who wants obedience) and a totalitarian state (which wants belief — and tries to control your memory and even your private thoughts). We sprint through the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s rise to power, then look at what happened in the 1930s: the forced collectivization of agriculture, the Ukrainian famine, the Great Purge, the Moscow show trials, the Gulag network of labour camps. We finish with what shocked Orwell most: how Soviet propaganda literally erased people from history — including the famous airbrushed photograph of Stalin on the Moscow-Volga canal, which kept losing companions every time it was reprinted.

You’ll hear about:

• What “totalitarian” actually means (Hannah Arendt’s definition)
• 1917 and the Russian Revolution in ninety seconds
• Stalin vs Trotsky — and how Stalin won by 1928
• The Holodomor: the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33
• The Great Purge of 1936–38 and the Moscow show trials
• The Gulag and the NKVD secret police
• Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico City, 1940
• How Soviet propaganda erased people from photographs and history

Coming next:

• Part 3 — Reading the Fable: Who’s Hidden Behind Each Animal

Level: B2 English. Length: ~6 minutes.