Snowball in Animal Farm is Leon Trotsky, and the most important thing about Snowball is not that Napoleon expelled him but that Snowball shared the vanguard assumptions that made the expulsion structurally inevitable. George Orwell constructed Snowball as the revolutionary who was more eloquent, more intellectually ambitious, and more genuinely committed to the farm’s welfare than Napoleon, yet who participated in the same foundational error: the belief that the pigs, as the intellectual elite, had the right and the obligation to govern. This shared assumption is the novel’s deepest diagnosis. The conventional reading presents Snowball as the betrayed hero whose alternative leadership would have produced a better farm. The text supports a harder reading: Snowball’s alternative leadership would have been less brutal, less personally corrupt, and less paranoid, but it would have preserved the structural arrangement in which one class of animals governed another class of animals on the basis of claimed intellectual superiority, and that structural arrangement is what the novel identifies as the revolution’s fatal inheritance from the regime it overthrew.

The argument this article advances is that Snowball is Trotsky, that this identification is not decorative but diagnostic, and that the diagnostic value lies in what it reveals about the novel’s critique of revolutionary vanguardism itself. Snowball was not Orwell’s preferred alternative. Orwell’s preferred alternative was not any pig. Bernard Crick’s authorized biography of Orwell, published in 1980, documents Orwell’s consistent anti-vanguardism across the 1930s and 1940s, from the Spanish Civil War essays through the composition of Animal Farm. John Newsinger’s Orwell’s Politics, published in 1999, extends this analysis to show that Orwell’s socialism was specifically anti-Leninist: Orwell believed in democratic, decentralized, worker-controlled socialism, not in the leadership of a revolutionary party claiming to represent workers while governing them. Snowball is the fictional embodiment of the revolutionary leader who is smarter, braver, and more articulate than his rival, and who still cannot escape the structural trap of the vanguard position he occupies.

The Trotsky Identification: Specific Correspondences

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879, was the most intellectually formidable figure of the Russian Revolution after Lenin. He organized the October 1917 insurrection in Petrograd, created and commanded the Red Army during the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1921, authored some of the most sophisticated Marxist theoretical work of the twentieth century, and was the primary rival to Joseph Stalin for leadership of the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in January 1924. Stalin defeated Trotsky in the succession struggle through a combination of bureaucratic maneuvering, alliance-building with Zinoviev and Kamenev, and the exploitation of Trotsky’s own political miscalculations. Trotsky was removed from the Politburo in 1926, expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, exiled to Alma-Ata in 1928, and expelled from the Soviet Union entirely in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico, where a Stalinist agent named Ramon Mercader assassinated him with an ice axe on August 20, 1940.

Orwell wrote Animal Farm between November 1943 and February 1944, when Trotsky had been dead for three years and Stalin was Britain’s wartime ally. The novel’s Snowball tracks Trotsky’s trajectory with remarkable specificity. In the opening chapters, Snowball is the more active, more articulate, and more visionary of the two leading pigs. He organizes committees, plans educational programs for the other animals, and takes the lead in theorizing the principles of Animalism. This corresponds to Trotsky’s role in the early Soviet state, where Trotsky was the public face of revolutionary energy: the orator, the military organizer, the theorist of permanent revolution. Napoleon, by contrast, operates behind the scenes from the start. He takes no interest in Snowball’s committees and focuses instead on consolidating quiet influence over key power structures, most notably the puppies he removes from their mothers to train privately. This corresponds to Stalin’s strategy of accumulating bureaucratic power through the General Secretary position while Trotsky occupied the spotlight.

The Battle of the Cowshed in Chapter Four is Snowball’s military moment, corresponding directly to Trotsky’s command of the Red Army during the Civil War. Snowball leads the animals’ defense against the human farmers’ attempt to retake Manor Farm, displays personal bravery, and is wounded in the fighting. Trotsky’s actual military accomplishments during the Russian Civil War were extraordinary by any historical standard. He built the Red Army from scratch, traveled constantly in his armored train to reinforce collapsing fronts, and was instrumental in the Bolshevik victory over the White forces. Orwell compressed these years of military leadership into a single battle, but the correspondence is precise: Snowball, like Trotsky, earned his revolutionary credentials through military service that required genuine personal courage.

Chapter Five’s windmill debate is the novel’s allegorical rendering of the Soviet industrialization debate of the mid-1920s. Snowball develops elaborate plans for a windmill that would bring electricity to the farm, reduce labor, and modernize agricultural production. Napoleon opposes the windmill, urinates on Snowball’s plans, and argues that the farm’s priority should be food production rather than ambitious technical projects. This tracks the real debate between Trotsky’s advocacy for rapid industrialization and the development of productive forces, and Stalin’s initial support for Bukharin’s gradualist approach. The historical irony, which Orwell captures perfectly, is that after expelling Trotsky and denouncing the industrialization program, Stalin adopted a version of the same program in the form of the Five-Year Plans, just as Napoleon eventually builds the windmill after expelling Snowball and claiming the design as his own.

Orwell constructed the expulsion scene as the novel’s most dramatic allegorical moment. Napoleon, who has said little during the windmill debate, suddenly unleashes the nine dogs he has been training in secret. The dogs chase Snowball off the farm entirely. Peter Davison, editor of The Complete Works of George Orwell, published in 1998, documented that Orwell revised this scene multiple times to ensure that the expulsion was sudden, violent, and accomplished through trained force rather than democratic process. The scene maps to the period between 1927 and 1929 when Stalin moved against Trotsky, using the party apparatus and the security services to isolate, expel, and ultimately exile his rival. The dogs are the novel’s equivalent of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police, who enforced Stalin’s consolidation of power.

Snowball After Expulsion: The Scapegoat Function

What happens to Snowball after his expulsion is arguably more important for the novel’s argument than the expulsion itself. Snowball becomes, in his absence, the explanation for every failure, every setback, and every misfortune on the farm. When the windmill collapses in a storm, Squealer announces that Snowball sabotaged it. When food supplies run short, Snowball is blamed for supposedly having agents among the animals who are carrying out acts of destruction. When Napoleon conducts his purges in Chapter Seven, forcing animals to confess to being Snowball’s agents and then having the dogs tear their throats out, the confessions are structured around the narrative of Snowball-as-conspirator.

This post-expulsion transformation maps with uncomfortable precision to the Stalinist treatment of Trotsky across the 1930s. After Trotsky’s exile, the Soviet regime constructed an elaborate mythology of Trotskyist conspiracy. The Moscow Show Trials of 1936 to 1938 produced forced confessions in which defendants acknowledged participation in fantastical plots allegedly orchestrated by Trotsky from abroad. Every industrial accident, every crop failure, every bureaucratic inefficiency was attributed to Trotskyist sabotage. Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume Trotsky biography, comprising The Prophet Armed in 1954, The Prophet Unarmed in 1959, and The Prophet Outcast in 1963, documents the construction of this scapegoat mythology in exhaustive detail. Orwell knew this pattern intimately. He had seen the anti-Trotskyist purges consume the Spanish Republic’s left during the Spanish Civil War, when the POUM, the party Orwell fought with in Catalonia, was suppressed by Stalinist forces as a Trotskyist organization, and Orwell himself was nearly arrested.

The scapegoat function Snowball performs in the novel illuminates something important about how authoritarian regimes maintain ideological coherence. A regime that claims to be building a perfect society must explain why the society is not yet perfect. If the explanation is structural, meaning if the regime acknowledges that its own policies or institutional design are producing the failures, then the regime loses its claim to legitimacy. If the explanation is attributed to external enemies conspiring with internal traitors, then the failures become evidence of the regime’s necessity: only the regime can protect the population from the conspiracy. Snowball’s absent presence in the middle and late chapters of Animal Farm is Orwell’s demonstration of this mechanism. The animals who remember Snowball’s actual contributions to the revolution, his bravery at the Battle of the Cowshed, his genuine interest in their education, gradually find their memories revised by Squealer’s propaganda until they can no longer distinguish what they actually remember from what they have been told to remember.

Striking parallels connect Snowball’s scapegoating to the mechanisms Orwell later explored in his masterwork on totalitarian reality-control. The Party’s doctrine that whoever controls the past controls the future operates in Animal Farm through Squealer’s revision of the animals’ memories of Snowball. The animals experience the same cognitive dissolution that Winston Smith experiences in Orwell’s later novel: they know, or once knew, that the official version of events is false, but the constant repetition of the false version, combined with the impossibility of consulting any independent record, gradually erodes their capacity to maintain the alternative memory. Snowball’s transformation from hero to villain in the animals’ collective consciousness is a practical demonstration of the memory-control lever that Orwell later theorized more explicitly.

The Vanguard Problem: Why Snowball Was Not the Alternative

The most important argument this article advances is the one most conventional treatments miss. The standard reading of Snowball presents him as the good pig, the one who would have led the farm well if Napoleon had not expelled him. This reading treats Napoleon’s coup as the moment the revolution went wrong, implying that if the coup had failed, if Snowball had remained in charge, the revolution would have succeeded. SparkNotes and LitCharts both reproduce versions of this reading, presenting Snowball as the idealistic visionary Napoleon betrays.

Orwell’s text complicates this reading significantly. Snowball participated in every decision the pigs made in the revolution’s early days that established the structural inequality the novel diagnoses. In Chapter Two, after the revolution, the pigs immediately set themselves up as the managerial class. They do not work in the fields. They supervise. They claim the right to make decisions on behalf of the other animals on the basis of their superior intelligence. Snowball participates in this arrangement without objection. The milk and apples are reserved for the pigs, and Squealer provides the justification, but the decision is collective among the pig leadership, and Snowball is part of that leadership. The Seven Commandments are written by the pigs, for the animals, and Snowball writes them alongside Napoleon. At no point in the novel does Snowball question the fundamental arrangement in which the pigs govern and the other animals labor.

This is Orwell’s allegorical rendering of the Leninist vanguard theory. Lenin argued that the working class, left to itself, could develop only trade-union consciousness, the capacity to fight for better conditions within the existing system, but not revolutionary consciousness, the capacity to overthrow the system itself. Revolutionary consciousness, Lenin argued, must be brought to the workers from outside, by a party of professional revolutionaries drawn from the intelligentsia. This theory justified the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power in the Soviet Union: the party governed not because it had been elected but because it claimed to understand the workers’ true interests better than the workers themselves understood them.

Orwell reviewed Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed in 1939 for the Adelphi magazine. This review, collected in Peter Davison’s Complete Works, is the single most important document for understanding Orwell’s specific views on Trotsky before he wrote Animal Farm, and it is rarely cited in popular treatments of the novel. In the review, Orwell acknowledges Trotsky’s brilliance and the power of his analysis of Stalinist degeneration, but he identifies what he considers Trotsky’s fundamental blind spot: Trotsky criticizes Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution without ever questioning whether the Leninist organizational model, the model Trotsky himself championed, contained within it the seeds of that betrayal. Orwell’s position, expressed clearly in this review and consistent across his subsequent writing, is that the vanguard-party structure is itself the problem. A revolution led by a self-appointed elite of professional revolutionaries claiming to represent the masses will, by the logic of its own organizational structure, produce a new ruling class that governs in its own interest while claiming to govern in the interest of the masses.

This is the argument Animal Farm makes through the Snowball-Napoleon relationship. The question the novel asks is not “Was Snowball or Napoleon the better leader?” The question the novel asks is “What happens when a revolution is led by an elite that claims the right to govern on the basis of its own claimed superiority?” The answer the novel gives is: eventually, one member of the elite consolidates personal power by eliminating rivals, and the elite transforms from a revolutionary vanguard into a new ruling class. Snowball’s expulsion is not the moment the revolution goes wrong. The revolution goes wrong in Chapter Two, when the pigs collectively assume the right to govern. Snowball’s expulsion is simply the moment when the intra-elite power struggle produces a winner.

Old Major’s Vision and the Pigs’ Collective Deviation

Understanding Snowball’s structural position requires returning to Old Major’s speech in Chapter One, the speech that inspires the revolution. Old Major, the prize boar who dies three days after delivering his vision, articulates a principle of radical animal equality. His speech contains no provision for a governing class among the animals. He identifies humanity as the enemy and envisions a society in which all animals share equally in the products of their labor, in which no animal exploits another, and in which the ancient tyranny of human over animal is replaced by fellowship among all animal species. Old Major’s vision is, in Marxist terms, a vision of the classless society: a world without rulers and ruled, without exploiters and exploited.

What happens between Old Major’s speech and the revolution’s first days is the novel’s most important analytical sequence. Old Major dies. The pigs, identified as the most intelligent animals, take it upon themselves to develop Old Major’s vision into a coherent ideology they name Animalism. Snowball and Napoleon are the leaders of this project, with Squealer as the propagandist. The pigs hold secret meetings in the barn where they explain the principles of Animalism to the other animals, but the explanation itself establishes the pattern that will eventually destroy the revolution’s promise: the pigs are the teachers, the other animals are the students. The pigs articulate the ideology, the other animals receive it. The relationship is pedagogical, not collaborative, and the pedagogical hierarchy maps directly onto the governing hierarchy that emerges after the revolution.

Snowball’s complicity in this process is specific and textually demonstrable. After the revolution succeeds in Chapter Two, the animals discover that the pigs have taught themselves to read and write during the preceding three months, using an old spelling book that belonged to Mr. Jones’s children. The pigs’ literacy is the novel’s first post-revolutionary privilege: the pigs can read the Seven Commandments they have written on the barn wall, but most of the other animals cannot. Snowball recognizes this literacy gap and attempts to address it through his educational committees, but the attempt itself preserves the structural inequality. Snowball is teaching the animals to read the commandments that the pigs have already written, within an ideological framework the pigs have already established. The education empowers the animals to access the pigs’ ideology, not to participate in its formation.

The milk-and-apples scene in Chapter Three is even more revealing. After the revolution, the animals discover that the cows’ milk has disappeared. It later emerges that the pigs have been mixing the milk into their own mash. Similarly, the windfall apples in the orchard are reserved for the pigs. Squealer justifies these privileges with an argument about brain workers needing special nutrition to manage the farm effectively. The argument is self-serving and transparently false, but it establishes a crucial precedent: the pigs’ governing role entitles them to material privileges that the other animals do not receive. Snowball does not object to this arrangement. He does not argue that the milk and apples should be shared equally, or that the pigs should work alongside the other animals in the fields, or that the governing arrangement should be restructured to prevent the accumulation of privileges. His silence is not Napoleon’s aggressive self-enrichment, but it is complicity in the structural inequality that Old Major’s vision explicitly prohibited.

Orwell’s construction of this sequence is deliberate. By showing Snowball participating in the deviation from Old Major’s egalitarian vision without objection, Orwell establishes that the structural problem precedes and produces the individual tyranny. Napoleon’s later consolidation of personal power is an acceleration of a pattern that was already present when both pigs were governing together. The vanguard-capture is not a Napoleonic innovation; it is the collective achievement of the pig leadership, in which Snowball is a full participant.

The Snowball-Napoleon Comparative Matrix

To understand how the novel constructs the relationship between Snowball and Napoleon, and to clarify where they genuinely differ and where they share the structural position the novel diagnoses, consider the following seven-dimension comparative analysis.

On the dimension of animal autonomy, Snowball supports limited animal self-governance through committees and education programs. He genuinely wants the animals to understand the principles of Animalism and to participate in farm decisions through the Sunday meetings. Napoleon shows no interest in animal education or participation. He attends the Sunday meetings but contributes little and eventually abolishes them. The difference is real: Snowball’s farm would have been more consultative. But the consultation occurs within a framework in which the pigs set the agenda, the pigs interpret the principles, and the pigs make the final decisions. Snowball’s consultative approach is analogous to Trotsky’s theoretical commitment to workers’ democracy within the framework of party leadership, a commitment that preserves the party’s governing monopoly while allowing greater internal debate than Stalin’s approach.

Regarding educational approach, Snowball organizes reading and writing classes for all the animals. He is a genuine educator who believes that the revolution’s success depends on the animals’ intellectual development. Napoleon takes the puppies aside and educates them separately, creating a private security force rather than an educated citizenry. The contrast is stark and genuine: Snowball values enlightenment where Napoleon values enforcement. But Snowball’s educational program teaches the animals to read and write using the pigs’ texts, within the pigs’ ideological framework. The education serves the revolution as the pigs define it, not as the animals themselves might define it. The Seven Commandments, which Snowball helps write and teach, include the principle that all animals are equal, but the educational apparatus that teaches this principle is already controlled by the pig leadership that will eventually add the qualifier “but some animals are more equal than others.”

On the dimension of military authority, both Snowball and Napoleon claim leadership roles in the farm’s defense, though Snowball is the more active and courageous military leader. Snowball personally leads the charge at the Battle of the Cowshed and is wounded. Napoleon is notably absent from the battle. But after the battle, both pigs claim the authority to determine military policy, and neither suggests that the animals who actually fought should have a voice in strategic decisions. The military hierarchy mirrors the political hierarchy: the pigs command, the other animals serve.

Consider the windmill development process. Snowball develops the windmill plans through sustained intellectual labor, spending weeks in the tool shed studying Mr. Jones’s books on engineering and drawing up elaborate blueprints. Napoleon’s response is to denounce the plans without offering an alternative, then to steal the plans after expelling Snowball and present them as his own. The contrast illuminates a genuine difference in intellectual seriousness: Snowball does the work, Napoleon appropriates it. But the windmill project itself is Snowball’s vision imposed on the farm without democratic deliberation about whether the animals want a windmill, what sacrifices the construction will require, or whether alternative development paths might serve their interests better. Snowball’s technocratic enthusiasm is analogous to Trotsky’s enthusiasm for rapid industrialization, a vision that was genuinely progressive in its economic analysis but that assumed the right of the revolutionary leadership to determine development priorities without consulting the workers whose labor would bear the costs.

On the dimension of response to opposition, Snowball engages opponents in debate. At the Sunday meetings, he argues his positions, responds to challenges, and attempts to win support through persuasion. Napoleon does not argue. He uses his control of the sheep, who bleat their slogans to drown out opposition, and eventually his control of the dogs, who enforce compliance through terror. The difference in method is real and significant. But both Snowball and Napoleon treat opposition as something to be overcome rather than as a legitimate expression of different interests. Snowball’s rhetoric at the Sunday meetings is designed to win, not to listen. He does not modify his windmill plans in response to animal concerns; he simply argues more eloquently until the animals agree with him. His approach is democratic in form but technocratic in substance.

Violence presents the clearest divergence. Snowball is less violent than Napoleon. He participates in the initial revolutionary violence of Chapter Two, the expulsion of Jones, and the defense of the farm at the Battle of the Cowshed, but he does not initiate violence against fellow animals. Napoleon, by contrast, uses the dogs to terrorize the farm, conducts purges, and eventually executes animals who confess to crimes they did not commit. This is the clearest difference between the two, and it corresponds to the genuine difference between Trotsky and Stalin as historical figures. Trotsky was capable of military violence in war and revolution, but he did not initiate the systematic internal terror that characterized Stalin’s rule. However, the article must note that the violence Snowball participates in during the revolution itself, the seizure of the farm by force, the expulsion of the human farmers, the confiscation of property, establishes the precedent that political objectives can be achieved through coercion. Napoleon extends this precedent to its logical conclusion within the vanguard framework. The difference is one of degree, not of kind.

Finally, regarding post-revolutionary projections, Snowball envisions a modernized farm with electricity, reduced labor, and educational advancement for all animals. This vision is generous and sincere. Napoleon’s post-revolutionary vision, insofar as he has one, centers on the consolidation of pig privileges: more food, better housing, fewer obligations, and absolute obedience from the other animals. But Snowball’s generous vision is still a vision of a farm governed by pigs. His imagined future includes windmills and literacy, but it does not include a redistribution of governing authority from pigs to the other animals. The revolution’s promise of equality is, in Snowball’s version as in Napoleon’s, an equality that preserves the governing class’s position while improving the governed class’s material conditions.

This seven-dimension matrix makes visible the novel’s structural argument. On most dimensions, Snowball is genuinely better than Napoleon: more consultative, more intellectual, more courageous, less violent, more sincere. But on the foundational dimension, the question of who governs and by what right, Snowball and Napoleon occupy the same position. Both assume that the pigs govern because the pigs are the most intelligent. Both participate in the establishment of a two-class system in which the pig-governors and the animal-workers occupy permanently distinct positions. The differences between them are differences of style, temperament, and degree of personal corruption, not differences of structural position. This is why the novel’s argument is harder and more important than the “Snowball good, Napoleon bad” reading that dominates popular treatments.

Orwell’s Anti-Vanguardism: The Intellectual Context

Understanding why Orwell constructed Snowball this way requires understanding the intellectual tradition Orwell was working within and against. Orwell was a socialist. He stated this repeatedly, most forcefully in the 1946 essay “Why I Write,” where he declared that every line of serious work he had written since 1936 had been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. The key modifier is “democratic.” Orwell’s socialism was not Leninist. He did not believe that a revolutionary party had the right to govern in the name of the working class. He believed in a socialism that emerged from the working class’s own self-organization, not from the leadership of an intellectual elite claiming to represent workers’ interests.

This position placed Orwell in a specific relationship to Trotsky and Trotskyism. Orwell admired Trotsky’s intellectual brilliance, his personal courage, and his willingness to criticize Stalin’s tyranny. But Orwell fundamentally disagreed with Trotsky’s organizational theory. Trotsky’s critique of Stalin, as Orwell read it, was that Stalin had betrayed the revolution by governing badly, not that the organizational form of the revolution, the vanguard party’s monopoly on power, was itself the problem. Trotsky wanted to replace the bad vanguard leadership with good vanguard leadership. Orwell wanted to replace vanguard leadership itself with democratic self-governance.

This disagreement explains the construction of Snowball in Animal Farm. Snowball is the good vanguard leader. He is everything Trotsky was: brilliant, brave, visionary, genuinely committed to the revolution’s ideals. And the novel shows that good vanguard leadership is not sufficient to prevent the revolution’s betrayal, because the betrayal is built into the vanguard structure itself. The pigs’ claim to govern on the basis of their intelligence is the revolution’s original sin. Everything that follows, Napoleon’s consolidation of power, the dogs’ reign of terror, the gradual revision of the Seven Commandments, the final transformation of the pigs into human-like rulers, proceeds from that original structural error. Snowball’s goodness is real, but it is goodness operating within a corrupted structure, and the structure, not the individual occupying it, determines the outcome.

Crick’s biography demonstrates that Orwell developed this position through direct experience. During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell served with the POUM militia on the Aragon front from December 1936 to June 1937. The POUM was an anti-Stalinist Marxist party that maintained a degree of internal democracy unusual among revolutionary organizations. Orwell’s experience in the POUM militia, where officers and enlisted men were treated as equals and decisions were made through collective discussion, shaped his vision of what democratic socialism could look like. His subsequent experience of the Stalinist suppression of the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937, when the Soviet-backed Communist Party used its security apparatus to crush the anti-Stalinist left, showed him what vanguard power looked like in practice. The Barcelona experience is the biographical origin of both Animal Farm and the later novel about totalitarian mechanisms that Orwell would set in a dystopian Britain.

Newsinger’s Orwell’s Politics extends this analysis by showing that Orwell’s anti-vanguardism was not limited to his anti-Stalinism but was a consistent position that also critiqued Trotskyist organizational theory. Newsinger argues that Orwell distinguished between three positions on the left: the Stalinist position, which justified the vanguard party’s totalitarian rule in the name of building socialism; the Trotskyist position, which criticized Stalin’s particular exercise of vanguard power while defending the vanguard principle itself; and the democratic-socialist position, which rejected the vanguard principle entirely in favor of workers’ self-governance. Orwell, Newsinger demonstrates, consistently occupied the third position. Animal Farm dramatizes this three-way distinction through Napoleon (the Stalinist), Snowball (the Trotskyist), and the animals themselves (the workers whose self-governance neither pig leadership supports).

Snowball’s Genuine Contributions: What the Novel Respects

The article’s argument that Snowball is structurally compromised must not be taken as a dismissal of Snowball’s genuine contributions to the revolution and the farm. The novel clearly respects Snowball in ways it does not respect Napoleon, and the article must respect what the text respects.

Snowball’s bravery at the Battle of the Cowshed is presented without irony. When the human farmers attack the farm in Chapter Four, Snowball has studied Julius Caesar’s campaigns and devised a defensive strategy. He leads the first diversionary charge, is wounded by pellets from Jones’s gun, and continues fighting. The animals win the battle in part because of Snowball’s strategic planning and personal courage. Napoleon is notably absent from the fighting. The novel awards Snowball the military decoration “Animal Hero, First Class,” and the decoration is presented as earned, not as propaganda. Orwell, who had been shot through the throat by a fascist sniper in Spain and nearly killed, understood military courage from personal experience and did not treat it lightly.

His educational programs are also presented with respect. His attempts to teach the animals to read and write represent a genuine commitment to their intellectual development. He organizes literacy classes, establishes reading groups, and attempts to simplify the principles of Animalism so that even the least intelligent animals can understand them. The fact that these programs ultimately fail, that the sheep can never get beyond bleating “Four legs good, two legs bad” and the hens and ducks cannot master the alphabet, reflects the difficulty of the educational task rather than any cynicism on Snowball’s part. Compare this to Napoleon’s educational approach: taking the puppies away from their mothers and training them privately as an enforcement apparatus. The contrast is clear and damning to Napoleon.

Snowball’s windmill plans represent intellectual ambition directed toward the farm’s collective benefit. He genuinely believes that electricity would transform the animals’ lives, reducing labor and improving comfort. His weeks of study in the tool shed, poring over Mr. Jones’s technical books and producing detailed blueprints, represent exactly the kind of intellectual labor that a revolutionary leadership should provide. The windmill is not a vanity project or a mechanism of control; it is a genuine attempt to use superior knowledge in the service of the community.

These genuine contributions make the novel’s argument harder, not easier. If Snowball were simply Napoleon’s mirror image, if he were equally cynical, equally power-hungry, and equally indifferent to the animals’ welfare, then the novel’s critique would be simple: the revolution failed because it was led by bad individuals. By making Snowball genuinely better than Napoleon, genuinely braver, smarter, more generous, and more public-spirited, Orwell ensures that the novel’s critique cannot be reduced to individual moral failure. The revolution fails not because its leaders were bad people but because its organizational structure concentrated power in the hands of a self-appointed elite, and that structure produced the betrayal regardless of the personal qualities of the individuals who occupied the elite positions. This is a structural critique, not a moral one, and it is far more devastating than the moral critique because it implies that replacing Napoleon with Snowball would not have solved the problem.

Squealer’s Revision of Snowball’s History

One of the novel’s most sophisticated analytical operations is the way it tracks the gradual revision of Snowball’s history after his expulsion. The revision operates in stages, each one more extreme than the last, and the staging itself is part of the novel’s argument about how propaganda works.

In the first stage, immediately after the expulsion, Napoleon simply claims credit for Snowball’s windmill plans. Squealer announces that Napoleon had in fact developed the windmill plans himself and that Snowball had stolen them. The animals are confused, because they remember Snowball working on the plans, but they accept Squealer’s explanation because Napoleon’s authority is backed by the dogs’ physical threat. This stage corresponds to the early Soviet revisions of Trotsky’s role, in which Trotsky’s contributions to the revolution were minimized and his ideas were appropriated by the Stalinist leadership.

During the second stage, Snowball is transformed from a failed leader into an active enemy. Squealer begins attributing every misfortune on the farm to Snowball’s supposed sabotage. The windmill collapses in a storm, and Squealer announces that Snowball crept back to the farm at night and destroyed it. Crops fail, and Snowball is blamed. Tools go missing, and Snowball is blamed. The attribution of every failure to an absent enemy serves a double function: it deflects responsibility from Napoleon’s leadership, and it creates a permanent state of emergency that justifies Napoleon’s consolidation of power.

In the third stage, Snowball’s entire history is revised. Squealer announces that new evidence has been discovered proving that Snowball was Jones’s secret agent all along, that his bravery at the Battle of the Cowshed was fabricated, and that he had in fact been fighting on Jones’s side during the battle. This revision is so extreme that some animals protest: they remember seeing Snowball lead the charge, remember his wound, remember his decoration. Squealer overrides their memories with the dogs standing behind him. This stage corresponds to the Moscow Show Trials’ most extreme claims, in which old Bolsheviks who had demonstrably fought for the revolution were forced to confess to having been agents of foreign powers since before 1917.

The progression from credit-claiming to sabotage-attribution to total history-revision follows a logic that the novel makes visible through its staging. Each stage prepares the ground for the next. Once the animals accept that Napoleon invented the windmill plans, they have conceded the principle that their own memories can be overridden by official pronouncements. Once they accept that principle, the next revision becomes easier: if their memory of who designed the windmill was wrong, perhaps their memory of who fought bravely at the Battle of the Cowshed is also wrong. Each concession erodes the animals’ capacity to maintain any independent account of the past, until they are entirely dependent on Squealer’s version of events for their understanding of their own history. This is the mechanism of memory-control that Orwell theorized in his analysis of totalitarian thought-control and that he dramatized through the Party’s systematic assault on independent thought.

The Dogs and the Expulsion: Violence as Political Technology

The expulsion scene in Chapter Five deserves close analysis because it is the novel’s pivot point and because its construction reveals Orwell’s understanding of how political violence functions as a technology of power.

At a Sunday meeting, Snowball and Napoleon are debating the windmill. Snowball delivers an eloquent speech and appears to be winning the vote. At this moment, Napoleon gives a signal, and nine enormous dogs, the puppies Napoleon took from their mothers and raised in secret, burst into the barn and chase Snowball off the farm. The dogs nearly catch him; he escapes only by squeezing through a gap in the hedge. He is never seen again.

The scene’s construction is deliberate. Orwell positions the expulsion at exactly the moment when democratic process would have produced a result Napoleon did not want. Snowball is about to win the vote. The animals are persuaded by his arguments. Democracy is working, in the sense that the better argument is prevailing. Napoleon’s intervention is the substitution of force for persuasion at the precise moment when persuasion would have gone against him. This is Orwell’s diagnosis of how authoritarian power emerges from revolutionary situations: not by defeating democracy in an open contest but by deploying violence at the moment when democracy threatens to produce an unwanted outcome.

Napoleon’s dogs are essential to this reading. Napoleon did not merely disagree with Snowball; he prepared the instruments of violence in advance. The puppies were taken from their mothers in Chapter Three, long before the windmill debate. Napoleon’s plan to use force against his rival was not a spontaneous response to losing a vote; it was a premeditated strategy executed over months. This corresponds to Stalin’s methodical preparation for the elimination of rivals: the placement of loyalists in key positions, the control of the party’s administrative apparatus, the development of the security services as instruments of personal power. The dogs in Animal Farm are the OGPU and later the NKVD, the secret police organizations that enforced Stalin’s dominance through intimidation, imprisonment, and execution.

How the other animals respond to the expulsion is as important as the expulsion itself. They are terrified by the dogs and do not resist. Three of the dogs growl at any animal who seems about to protest, and the animals fall silent. This is how political violence works as technology: a single dramatic act of force, witnessed by the entire community, establishes the credibility of the threat, and the threat then operates without further violence being necessary. Napoleon does not need to chase every animal off the farm; he needs only to demonstrate, once, that he can and will use force against anyone who opposes him. The demonstration is sufficient to produce compliance.

The parallel to the vanguard-figure psychology Orwell later explored through the Inner Party functionary who processes dissidents is instructive. In the later novel, the regime’s violence is institutionalized and systematic. In Animal Farm, it is personal and direct: the dictator’s trained animals attacking his rival. The difference reflects the difference in the two novels’ time horizons. Animal Farm covers the revolution and its immediate betrayal, the period when personal power is being consolidated. The later novel depicts the mature totalitarian state, where violence has been absorbed into institutional structures and no longer requires the personal intervention of the dictator. Snowball’s expulsion is a scene from the first phase; the Ministry of Love is an institution of the second phase. Together, the two novels compose Orwell’s complete diagnosis of how revolutionary violence transforms into institutional totalitarianism.

The Windmill: Snowball’s Legacy and Napoleon’s Appropriation

After Snowball’s expulsion, the windmill functions in the novel as a symbol of his stolen legacy and as a demonstration of how authoritarian regimes appropriate the ideas they have purged. After expelling Snowball and denouncing the windmill as a waste of time, Napoleon reverses his position and announces that the windmill will be built after all. Squealer explains that Napoleon had always supported the windmill in secret and that the appearance of opposition was a strategic maneuver to remove the dangerous influence of Snowball.

This reversal has a precise historical correspondence. Stalin initially opposed Trotsky’s program of rapid industrialization, siding with Bukharin’s advocacy of continued support for the New Economic Policy and gradual development. After eliminating Trotsky from the political scene, Stalin adopted a version of the rapid industrialization program in the form of the First Five-Year Plan, launched in 1928. The plan’s targets and methods bore a recognizable resemblance to proposals Trotsky had advanced. Trotsky himself noted the irony from exile: Stalin was implementing a distorted version of the very program he had used to destroy Trotsky politically.

The windmill’s construction in Animal Farm subjects the animals to enormous hardship. They work longer hours, receive less food, and endure harsher conditions than they did under Jones. The windmill collapses twice, once due to a storm and once due to the human farmers’ attack, and must be rebuilt each time. Napoleon uses the windmill project simultaneously as a source of legitimacy (he is building the future) and as an instrument of control (the hardship it demands justifies the intensification of discipline and the reduction of rations). The windmill’s meaning shifts from Snowball’s genuine vision of collective improvement to Napoleon’s tool of labor extraction and political control.

A broader pattern in revolutionary history emerges from this analysis. Modernization projects in post-revolutionary states, from the Soviet Five-Year Plans to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to various developing-world industrialization programs, frequently follow the trajectory Animal Farm describes: an ambitious vision of collective improvement becomes, in the hands of an authoritarian leadership, a mechanism for extracting labor and consolidating power. The vision’s original author may have been sincere, but the institutional framework within which the vision is implemented transforms it into something the author would not have recognized or endorsed. Snowball’s windmill is Trotsky’s industrialization program: a genuinely progressive idea that, implemented by the wrong institutional structure, becomes an instrument of oppression.

Boxer’s Relationship to Both Pigs

Boxer, the working-class horse whose loyalty is exploited unto death, illuminates the Snowball-Napoleon comparison from below. Boxer is loyal to the revolution, to the pig leadership, and eventually to Napoleon personally. His two slogans, “I will work harder” and “Napoleon is always right,” encapsulate the working-class position the novel diagnoses: absolute commitment to labor combined with absolute deference to authority.

What matters for the Snowball-Napoleon comparison is whether Boxer’s position would have been fundamentally different under Snowball’s leadership. The text suggests that Snowball would have treated Boxer better. Snowball’s educational programs would have offered Boxer opportunities for intellectual development. Snowball’s consultative approach to farm governance would have given Boxer a voice, or at least the appearance of a voice, in decisions affecting his life. Snowball’s more generous temperament would have ensured that Boxer received adequate food and rest.

But Snowball would not have changed Boxer’s structural position. Boxer would still have been a worker governed by pigs who claimed the right to govern on the basis of their superior intelligence. Boxer’s labor would still have been extracted for the benefit of the governing class, even if the extraction were less brutal. Boxer’s deference to authority would still have been encouraged, because Snowball’s leadership, like Napoleon’s, depended on the working animals’ willingness to follow pig direction without questioning the pigs’ right to direct. The tragedy of Boxer is not merely that he serves a bad master; it is that the revolutionary framework to which he gives his absolute loyalty is structured so that his loyalty serves the governing class regardless of which individual pig occupies the leadership position.

This reading is what makes Animal Farm a structural critique rather than a moral tale about good leaders versus bad leaders. The moral tale says: if only Snowball had remained in charge, Boxer would have been treated well. The structural critique says: the system in which pigs govern and horses labor will produce Boxer’s exploitation regardless of which pig governs, because the exploitation is built into the system’s architecture, not into the individual leader’s character.

Scholarly Disagreement: Snowball as Hero or Structural Critique

The scholarly literature on Snowball divides broadly into two camps. The first camp, represented by most textbook and study-guide treatments, reads Snowball as the novel’s hero: the idealistic, brave, intelligent leader whose expulsion represents the revolution’s betrayal. In this reading, the novel’s message is that good leaders can be defeated by bad ones, and that the failure to protect good leadership leads to tyranny. This reading aligns with a liberal-democratic framework in which the quality of individual leaders determines political outcomes.

A second camp, represented by Newsinger and by scholars working in the tradition of Orwell’s own democratic socialism, reads Snowball as structurally compromised. In this reading, Snowball is better than Napoleon but shares the foundational error that makes the revolution’s betrayal inevitable. The novel’s message is that vanguard leadership, even at its best, contains within it the structural potential for the betrayal it claims to prevent. This reading aligns with the anarchist and democratic-socialist traditions that Orwell drew on, traditions that critique not individual leaders but the organizational forms that concentrate power in the hands of a self-appointed elite.

Between these two positions, this article adjudicates in favor of the second reading as more textually supported and more analytically powerful. The textual evidence includes Snowball’s participation in the pig collective’s assumption of governing authority in Chapter Two, his acceptance of the milk-and-apples privilege, his failure to question the two-class structure of the post-revolutionary farm, and the consistency of Orwell’s anti-vanguardism across his entire body of work. The analytical power of the second reading lies in its capacity to explain why the revolution fails even in the counterfactual scenario where Snowball wins: the structural problem is the vanguard arrangement itself, not the particular vanguard leader who happens to prevail in the intra-elite power struggle.

This does not mean that the difference between Snowball and Napoleon is trivial. A farm governed by Snowball would have been significantly better for the animals than the farm Napoleon governs. Less violence, more education, more consultation, more genuine concern for animal welfare. These are not small differences. But they are differences within a framework that the novel identifies as fundamentally flawed, and the novel’s argument is that even the best version of the flawed framework will eventually reproduce the patterns the revolution was supposed to abolish. The pigs will walk on two legs. The pigs will carry whips. The pigs will become indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. Snowball might have delayed this process, but the process proceeds from the structure, and the structure is what both pigs share.

The Comparative Frame: Snowball and Other Expelled Visionaries

Snowball’s expulsion and subsequent scapegoating place him in a literary tradition of expelled visionaries whose ideas are stolen by the leaders who expelled them. The pattern appears across Orwell’s own work: in the later dystopian novel, Goldstein functions as a Trotsky-like figure whose alleged conspiracy justifies the regime’s permanent state of emergency, though the later novel complicates the parallel by making Goldstein’s very existence uncertain. The relationship between the expelled intellectual and the regime that uses his absence as a political tool is one of Orwell’s recurring concerns.

The pattern also connects to broader literary treatments of political exile and scapegoating. Jack Merridew’s assumption of power in William Golding’s island narrative offers a different version of the same dynamic: the leader who prevails through the appeal to violence rather than reason. But Golding’s treatment differs from Orwell’s in a crucial respect. Golding’s novel is about human nature, about the darkness inherent in all people when civilizational constraints are removed. Orwell’s novel is about political structures, about the specific organizational forms that produce specific political outcomes. Snowball is expelled not because Napoleon is inherently evil but because the vanguard structure creates the conditions for the expulsion. The structural analysis is more politically useful than the anthropological one, because structures can be changed while human nature, if Golding’s premise is accepted, cannot.

The comparison extends to Piggy’s marginalization in the same novel, where the intellectual whose ideas are most valuable to the group is systematically excluded by the group’s emerging power dynamics. Both Snowball and Piggy are intellectuals whose contributions are genuine and whose marginalization or expulsion reflects the tendency of power structures to favor the capacity for coercion over the capacity for thought. The difference is that Piggy is marginalized within a spontaneous social order that emerges from the breakdown of civilization, while Snowball is expelled within a revolutionary organization that was supposed to create a new civilization. Orwell’s version is more targeted because it identifies the specific organizational mechanism, the vanguard structure, that produces the intellectual’s expulsion.

Snowball’s Name and Orwell’s Allegorical Method

Orwell’s choice of names in Animal Farm is deliberate and interpretively significant. “Napoleon” is named after Napoleon Bonaparte, whose revolutionary career followed the same trajectory as Stalin’s: from revolutionary leader to imperial dictator. The name signals that the pattern the novel describes is not unique to the Russian Revolution but recurs across revolutionary history. “Snowball” is a more complex naming choice. A snowball is something that grows as it rolls, accumulating mass and speed, but that is also inherently unstable and temporary. It melts. It cannot endure. The name suggests that Snowball’s political project, whatever its virtues, is built on a foundation that cannot sustain itself.

The name also carries a connotation of innocence and play. Snowballs are associated with childhood games, with winter leisure, with harmless fun. This connotation aligns with the novel’s portrait of Snowball as the more appealing, more playful, more engaging of the two pig leaders. Snowball makes committees and organizes debates; Napoleon plots in silence. Snowball engages the animals’ enthusiasm; Napoleon manages their obedience. But the childhood associations also suggest a kind of naivety about power that the novel ultimately judges as a political liability. Snowball does not understand that the structure he participates in will destroy him, because he does not understand that the vanguard framework is inherently vulnerable to the kind of power consolidation Napoleon undertakes.

Orwell’s allegorical method in Animal Farm operates on the principle that the animal fable form is not a decorative layer placed over a political argument but is itself the argument’s medium. The choice to tell the story of the Russian Revolution through animals on a farm accomplishes something that a realistic novel about the Russian Revolution could not: it strips away the historical specifics that obscure the structural patterns. By reducing the revolutionaries to pigs, the workers to horses and hens and sheep, and the intelligence apparatus to dogs, Orwell makes the class structure of the post-revolutionary state visible in a way that realistic fiction, with its obligation to represent the complexity of individual psychology, cannot achieve. The fable form is reductive, and the reduction is the point. The novel’s complete framing as an allegorical argument demonstrates that the simplification is Orwell’s most powerful analytical tool.

The Teaching Problem: How Snowball Is Misread in Classrooms

Snowball is among the most commonly misread characters in the secondary-school literature curriculum. The misreading follows a predictable pattern: teachers present the novel as a story about good leadership versus bad leadership, Snowball represents good leadership, Napoleon represents bad leadership, and the lesson is that people should choose good leaders and resist bad ones. This reading is not wrong in the sense that it correctly identifies real differences between Snowball and Napoleon. But it domesticates the novel’s critique by reducing a structural argument to a moral one.

The structural argument has different teaching implications. If the novel’s point is that good leaders are better than bad leaders, then the lesson is about individual character and the importance of choosing wisely. If the novel’s point is that the vanguard structure is the problem, that the concentration of power in the hands of a self-appointed elite will produce tyranny regardless of the elite’s personal qualities, then the lesson is about institutional design and the importance of distributing power rather than concentrating it. The second lesson is harder to teach, because it requires students to think about systems rather than individuals, and because it produces a more uncomfortable conclusion: that the revolution’s failure is not attributable to one villain’s treachery but to a structural pattern that the novel’s heroes participate in.

Crick’s biography suggests that Orwell would have preferred the harder reading. Orwell’s consistent position, from Homage to Catalonia through the wartime essays to Animal Farm and beyond, was that the left’s failure was not a failure of individual character but a failure of organizational form. The Stalinist model of revolutionary organization produced Stalinism not because Stalin was uniquely evil but because the organizational model concentrated power in ways that made the emergence of a dictator structurally likely. The model needed to be replaced, not reformed. Snowball represents the reformist position: keep the vanguard structure but staff it with better people. Orwell’s position is that the structure itself must go.

The implications for reading the literary treatment of power and authority across Orwell’s work are significant. If Animal Farm is read as a moral tale about good and bad leaders, it disconnects from the later novel about totalitarian control, which is clearly a structural critique of institutional power rather than a moral tale about individual tyranny. Reading Animal Farm structurally, as the article argues, reconnects the two novels into a coherent intellectual project: Animal Farm diagnoses the revolutionary phase of vanguard-power consolidation, and the later novel diagnoses the mature phase of totalitarian institutional control. Snowball’s expulsion in Animal Farm corresponds to the regime’s processing of dissidents in the later novel: both are mechanisms by which concentrated power eliminates threats to its monopoly.

The Absent Snowball and the Politics of Memory

Snowball’s absence from the novel’s second half is as significant as his presence in the first half. After Chapter Five, Snowball never appears again. He exists only as a name invoked by Squealer, a phantom blamed for every failure, a ghost whose alleged conspiracies justify Napoleon’s every act of repression. This structural absence mirrors Trotsky’s position in Soviet political discourse after 1929. Trotsky was physically absent from the Soviet Union, living in a series of increasingly remote exiles, but he was politically omnipresent as the regime’s primary scapegoat.

The politics of memory that the novel tracks through Snowball’s absent presence is one of Orwell’s most penetrating analyses. The animals’ memories of Snowball are gradually replaced by Squealer’s version of events. The process is not instantaneous; it unfolds over chapters, with each revision building on the previous one. First, Snowball’s windmill plans are attributed to Napoleon. Then, Snowball is blamed for sabotaging the windmill. Then, Snowball’s heroism at the Battle of the Cowshed is denied. Then, Snowball is revealed to have been Jones’s agent all along. Each revision requires the animals to surrender a piece of their own memory, and each surrender makes the next revision easier.

The novel makes visible the mechanisms by which this memory-replacement operates. Squealer’s rhetoric combines three techniques: the appeal to authority (Napoleon has said), the appeal to expertise (it has been proved by documents), and the implicit threat (the dogs are always present during Squealer’s announcements). The combination of authority, expertise, and threat creates an environment in which the animals cannot safely maintain their own memories, because contradicting the official version means contradicting Napoleon, which means facing the dogs. The analytical architecture of memory-control and thought-suppression that Orwell later developed in the story of an individual dissident’s destruction is already present in embryonic form in Animal Farm’s treatment of Snowball’s absent presence.

Clover’s response to the revisions is the novel’s most psychologically precise rendering of how memory-replacement operates at the individual level. Clover is the maternal mare who remembers the revolution’s original promises and senses that something has gone wrong, but who cannot articulate what has changed because she lacks the vocabulary and the literacy to consult the original commandments written on the barn wall. When Squealer revises the history of the Battle of the Cowshed, Clover feels certain that the new version is wrong, that she remembers Snowball fighting bravely, but she cannot prove it and she cannot safely say it. Her position is the position of the citizen in an authoritarian state who knows the official version of events is false but who has been stripped of the tools necessary to articulate an alternative. Clover represents the moment when private memory becomes politically impotent because the institutional supports for independent memory, a free press, accessible records, the right to speak without fear, have been systematically removed.

Benjamin the donkey offers a different response to Snowball’s memory-erasure. Benjamin, the oldest animal on the farm, reads as well as any pig but refuses to use his literacy. He sees through every revision, every manipulation, every lie, but he does not speak up. His cynical silence reflects a different kind of complicity: the complicity of the intellectual who sees the truth but concludes that speaking it will not change anything. Benjamin’s passivity makes him, in some readings, the novel’s most damning portrait: the intelligent observer who could challenge the regime’s narrative but who has decided that all political systems are equally corrupt and that resistance is therefore pointless. His refusal to testify on behalf of Snowball’s actual history, a testimony he is uniquely positioned to provide given his literacy and his memory, is an abdication that enables the regime’s revision to succeed.

For students and scholars exploring these themes across Orwell’s work, tools like the Classic Literature Study Guide on ReportMedic offer structured frameworks for tracking how specific literary mechanisms operate across an author’s texts, making the connections between early and later works visible in ways that isolated study of individual novels often misses.

Snowball and the Revolution’s Unasked Question

The deepest layer of the novel’s treatment of Snowball concerns the question the revolution never asks. The revolution asks: Who will lead us? The pigs answer: We will, because we are the most intelligent. This answer is accepted without challenge in the revolution’s early days, and it produces the two-class structure, pig-governors and animal-workers, that the novel identifies as the revolution’s fatal inheritance.

The question the revolution never asks is: Why should anyone lead us at all? Old Major’s original vision, delivered in the speech that inspires the revolution, is a vision of animal equality: all animals are comrades, no animal shall tyrannize over another, all the products of animal labor shall belong to the animals who produce them. This vision does not include a provision for a governing class. The assumption that the pigs will govern emerges after the revolution, not from Old Major’s speech, and it is accepted without the kind of deliberation that such a fundamental departure from the revolution’s founding principles would seem to require.

Snowball’s failure is not that he is a bad leader but that he never asks this question. He never suggests that the pigs should work in the fields alongside the other animals. He never proposes that governing authority should be shared equally among all animals, or rotated, or made subject to recall. He accepts the pigs’ governing monopoly as natural and focuses his energy on being the best possible pig-governor rather than on questioning whether pig-governance is the right arrangement. This is the structural position he shares with Napoleon, and it is the position the novel identifies as the revolution’s undoing.

Orwell’s own answer to the unasked question is implicit in the novel’s structure. The periods when the farm functions best, in the weeks immediately after the revolution, are periods when the animals’ collective enthusiasm substitutes for formal governance. The animals work hard because they are working for themselves, not because a governing authority directs them. The harvest is brought in faster and more efficiently than it ever was under Jones, and the improvement reflects the animals’ own motivation rather than any pig’s management skill. The pigs’ assumption of governance does not improve on this collective self-organization; it replaces it with a hierarchical structure that gradually reproduces the inequalities the revolution was supposed to abolish.

The structural analysis connects to Orwell’s broader exploration of how institutional power operates on individual consciousness. In both Animal Farm and the later novel, the fundamental mechanism of oppression is the replacement of individual and collective self-governance with governance by an elite that claims to act in the governed population’s interest. The claim is sincere in Snowball’s case, cynical in Napoleon’s, and fraudulent in the later novel’s Inner Party’s case. But the claim’s sincerity does not change the structural outcome, because the structural outcome proceeds from the concentration of power, not from the character of the individuals who hold it.

The Reception of Snowball: Cold War and Beyond

The reception history of Snowball as a character tracks the broader reception history of Animal Farm itself. During the Cold War, the novel was widely read as an anti-communist text, and Snowball was read as the good communist who would have built a better Soviet Union if Stalin had not betrayed the revolution. This reading served the political purposes of Western anti-communism, which was interested in demonstrating that the Soviet Union was a betrayal of socialism’s ideals rather than their realization. Snowball-as-hero supported the argument that the problem was not communism itself but its implementation by a specific dictator.

Orwell was uncomfortable with this reading even before the Cold War fully crystallized. His 1945 preface to Animal Farm, which was initially suppressed and only published posthumously, makes clear that the novel’s target was not communism as an ideal but the specific organizational forms of the Soviet revolution, and that the critique extended to the Trotskyist alternative as well as the Stalinist reality. Orwell did not want his novel to be used as a weapon in the Cold War’s ideological arsenal, though he could not prevent this appropriation.

Animal Farm’s publishing history itself illuminates the political pressures surrounding the novel. Four publishers rejected Animal Farm before Secker and Warburg accepted it in 1945. Jonathan Cape initially accepted the manuscript but withdrew after consulting the Ministry of Information, which advised against publishing a satire of the Soviet Union while Britain was allied with Stalin against Hitler. T.S. Eliot, acting as a reader for Faber and Faber, rejected the novel on explicitly political grounds, writing that he was not persuaded the book offered the right point of view from which to criticize the Soviet system. Eliot’s objection, interestingly, was not that the novel was wrong about Stalin but that it did not provide a sufficiently clear alternative: Eliot wanted to know what Orwell’s positive program was, and the novel, in Eliot’s view, suggested only that the other animals should have been smarter or that a better class of pig should have led. Eliot’s misreading is precisely the Snowball-as-hero reading that the novel, properly understood, works against. Orwell’s positive program was not better pigs but no pigs, a distinction that Eliot, reading from a conservative rather than a democratic-socialist position, did not register.

The novel’s initial reception in the United States was shaped by the emerging Cold War. The CIA’s Cultural Affairs division funded translations of Animal Farm into dozens of languages as part of its broader campaign to promote anti-Soviet literature. John Rodden’s scholarship on Orwell’s reception history documents how the novel was systematically deployed as Cold War propaganda, with the structural critique of vanguardism stripped away in favor of the simpler anti-Soviet message. In this propaganda reading, Snowball was the good communist who proved that communism could have worked if not for Stalin, a reading that served Western liberal purposes by distinguishing between communism-as-ideal and communism-as-practice. Orwell’s actual argument, that the vanguard structure itself was the problem, was too radical for Cold War uses because it implicitly criticized not just the Soviet model but any political system in which an elite governs on the basis of claimed expertise rather than democratic mandate.

After the Cold War ended, the reception of Snowball became more varied. Some scholars, working in the tradition of Newsinger’s analysis, have recovered the structural reading that the Cold War reception obscured. Others have focused on the novel’s relevance to contemporary politics, reading Snowball’s scapegoating as a template for how modern authoritarian movements create enemy-figures to justify their consolidation of power. The scapegoat function Snowball performs, the transformation of a real individual into a mythological threat whose alleged conspiracies explain every failure and justify every repression, recurs across political systems and historical periods.

The teaching of Snowball in classrooms has gradually evolved to incorporate more of the novel’s complexity. The best contemporary pedagogical treatments present Snowball not as a simple hero or a simple Trotsky-analogue but as a character whose genuine virtues operate within a structural framework that the novel critiques. This approach preserves both the moral distinction between Snowball and Napoleon (which the text clearly supports) and the structural analysis that makes the novel’s critique more than a morality tale about good and bad leaders. The kind of layered analytical reading that Orwell rewards, where the surface narrative carries one meaning and the structural architecture carries another, is precisely the skill that structured study tools like the Classic Literature Study Guide on ReportMedic help students develop, offering interactive exploration of character relationships and thematic connections that illuminate how individual character readings connect to broader structural arguments.

Why Snowball Matters: The Novel’s Enduring Argument

Snowball matters because the question he embodies, whether better leadership within a flawed structure can prevent the structure’s worst outcomes, is a question that recurs in every political context where concentrated power is at issue. The novel’s answer is that better leadership helps, that Snowball’s farm would have been measurably better than Napoleon’s farm, but that better leadership within a fundamentally unequal structure cannot prevent the structure from reproducing inequality. The revolution’s promise of equality requires not just good leaders but structural arrangements that distribute power rather than concentrate it.

This argument connects Animal Farm to the broader tradition of political thought about institutional design. The Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in 1787 and 1788, argue that the American constitutional system must be designed so that the structure of government prevents tyranny regardless of the personal qualities of the individuals who hold office. Madison’s famous argument in Federalist No. 51 that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” is a structural argument: the system must constrain power-holders through institutional checks rather than relying on their personal virtue. Orwell’s critique of the vanguard structure in Animal Farm makes a parallel argument from the left: a revolutionary organization that concentrates power in the hands of a self-appointed elite will produce tyranny regardless of the elite’s personal qualities, and the solution is structural, not moral.

Orwell’s structural critique operates at a level of political analysis that distinguishes his contribution from both his liberal critics and his leftist allies. Liberal critics of the Soviet Union tended to argue that the problem was insufficient democracy, that if the Soviet system had included free elections and an independent judiciary, Stalin’s tyranny would have been prevented. Orwell’s analysis cuts deeper: the vanguard-party structure, by concentrating ideological authority in the hands of a self-appointed elite, prevents the emergence of genuine democratic institutions even when the leadership sincerely intends to create them. Democracy cannot be bestowed by a governing class upon a governed class; it must be practiced as self-governance from the start, or the governing class will find reasons to defer its implementation indefinitely. Snowball’s educational committees, his Sunday-meeting debates, his windmill-planning consultations are all forms of managed participation that leave the pigs’ governing authority unchallenged. They are democracy’s appearance without its substance, and Orwell understood that the appearance of democracy can be more dangerous than its frank absence, because it provides legitimacy to a structure that has not actually distributed power.

Rosa Luxemburg, the German-Polish revolutionary murdered in 1919, made a similar argument about the Bolsheviks in her essay on the Russian Revolution, written from prison in 1918. Luxemburg praised the Bolsheviks for their revolutionary courage while warning that their suppression of democratic institutions would produce a bureaucratic dictatorship. Her critique anticipated Orwell’s by a quarter-century: the problem was not the revolutionaries’ intentions but the organizational structure’s inherent tendencies. Orwell almost certainly knew Luxemburg’s critique, though he did not cite it directly. His position in Animal Farm is essentially Luxemburg’s position dramatized as fable: the revolution’s organizational form determines its political outcome more reliably than the revolutionaries’ personal character.

The novel’s treatment of how revolutionary ideals are betrayed by the institutions created to implement them resonates with contemporary debates about institutional power, democratic accountability, and the relationship between organizational structure and political outcomes. Snowball’s character is Orwell’s most nuanced contribution to these debates: not a villain, not simply a hero, but a demonstration of how genuine virtue operating within a corrupted structure becomes complicit in the structure’s corruption.

The namable claim this article advances is: Snowball is Trotsky. Snowball is not Orwell’s preferred alternative. Orwell’s preferred alternative was not any pig.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who is Snowball in Animal Farm?

Snowball is one of the two leading pigs who emerge as the farm’s rulers after the revolution that expels the human farmer Mr. Jones. He is the more intellectually active, more eloquent, and more publicly engaged of the two pig leaders. Snowball organizes educational committees, devises the farm’s defensive strategy at the Battle of the Cowshed, and develops ambitious plans for a windmill that would bring electricity to the farm. He corresponds allegorically to Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who was Lenin’s chief collaborator, organized the Red Army, and was Stalin’s primary rival for the leadership of the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death. Snowball is expelled from the farm by Napoleon’s trained dogs in Chapter Five, corresponding to Trotsky’s exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, and spends the rest of the novel as an absent scapegoat blamed for every failure and misfortune.

Q: Is Snowball based on Trotsky?

Yes. The correspondences between Snowball and Leon Trotsky are specific and systematic. Snowball’s intellectual energy corresponds to Trotsky’s prolific theoretical output. Snowball’s military leadership at the Battle of the Cowshed corresponds to Trotsky’s command of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. Snowball’s windmill plans correspond to Trotsky’s advocacy for rapid industrialization. Snowball’s expulsion by Napoleon’s dogs corresponds to Trotsky’s exile from the Soviet Union by Stalin’s security apparatus. Snowball’s post-expulsion transformation into a scapegoat blamed for all the farm’s problems corresponds to the Stalinist regime’s construction of an elaborate mythology of Trotskyist conspiracy during the 1930s. Orwell constructed these correspondences deliberately, drawing on his detailed knowledge of Soviet political history and his personal experience of Stalinist anti-Trotskyist politics during the Spanish Civil War.

Q: What are Snowball’s main character traits?

Snowball’s primary traits include intellectual ambition, rhetorical skill, genuine bravery, and a sincere commitment to the revolution’s ideals of animal equality and collective improvement. He is the more articulate of the two pig leaders, winning debates at the Sunday meetings through the force of his arguments rather than through intimidation or procedural manipulation. He is personally courageous, leading the charge at the Battle of the Cowshed and sustaining a wound from Jones’s shotgun pellets while continuing to fight. He is intellectually curious and genuinely studious, spending weeks poring over Mr. Jones’s books to develop the windmill plans and mastering engineering concepts that none of the other animals could approach. He is a genuine educator who organizes literacy classes and educational committees for the other animals, believing that the revolution’s long-term success depends on their intellectual advancement. His weaknesses include a failure to recognize the threat Napoleon poses, a naive confidence that persuasion will always prevail over force, and a structural blindness to his own complicity in the vanguard arrangement that gives the pigs governing authority over the other animals.

Q: Why does Napoleon expel Snowball from the farm?

Napoleon expels Snowball because Snowball represents a rival center of power and popularity that threatens Napoleon’s consolidation of personal control. The immediate trigger is the windmill debate: Snowball is about to win the vote at a Sunday meeting, and Napoleon, unwilling to accept a democratic outcome that goes against him, unleashes his trained dogs to drive Snowball off the farm by force. The deeper reason is that Napoleon has been preparing for this moment since the revolution, taking the puppies from their mothers and training them as a personal security force. The expulsion is not spontaneous but premeditated, reflecting Stalin’s methodical preparation for the elimination of Trotsky through bureaucratic maneuvering and the deployment of the security services.

Q: What happens to Snowball after he leaves the farm?

Snowball is never seen again after his expulsion. He exists in the novel’s second half only as a phantom, a name invoked by Squealer to explain every failure and justify every act of repression. Napoleon’s regime claims that Snowball crept back to the farm at night to sabotage the windmill, that he destroyed crops, stole food, and conspired with the human farmers against Animal Farm. Eventually, Squealer announces that newly discovered evidence proves Snowball was Jones’s secret agent all along and that his bravery at the Battle of the Cowshed was fabricated. These escalating accusations correspond to the Stalinist regime’s escalating demonization of Trotsky during the 1930s, culminating in the Moscow Show Trials’ claims that Trotsky had been conspiring with foreign powers against the Soviet Union since before the revolution.

Q: Is Snowball a good leader in Animal Farm?

Snowball is a better leader than Napoleon by most measures. He is more consultative, more intellectually honest, more genuinely concerned with the animals’ welfare, and less personally corrupt. His educational programs, his military courage, and his windmill plans all reflect genuine commitment to the farm’s collective improvement. However, the novel complicates the question of “good leadership” by showing that Snowball participates in the fundamental structural error of the post-revolutionary farm: the assumption that the pigs, as the intellectual elite, have the right to govern the other animals. Snowball’s leadership is good within a framework the novel identifies as fundamentally flawed, and the novel’s argument is that good leadership within a flawed structure cannot prevent the structure from producing its characteristic outcomes.

Q: Does Snowball ever come back to Animal Farm?

No. Snowball never returns to the farm in the novel. His permanent absence is structurally important to the novel’s argument. An absent enemy is more useful to an authoritarian regime than a present one, because an absent enemy’s alleged activities cannot be verified or disproven. Napoleon’s regime attributes every failure to Snowball’s supposed sabotage, and because Snowball is not present to defend himself, the accusations are unfalsifiable. This mirrors the Stalinist regime’s use of Trotsky as a scapegoat: Trotsky’s physical absence from the Soviet Union made him a perfect vessel for the regime’s conspiracy theories, because no one within the Soviet Union could access Trotsky’s actual writings or verify the regime’s claims about his activities.

Q: What is the windmill plan and why is it important?

Snowball’s windmill plan is a proposal to build a windmill on the farm that would generate electricity, power various machines, reduce the animals’ manual labor, and modernize agricultural production. Snowball develops the plans through sustained intellectual labor, studying Mr. Jones’s engineering books and producing detailed blueprints. The plan is important on multiple levels. Allegorically, it corresponds to the Soviet debate about rapid industrialization in which Trotsky advocated for ambitious technological development. Narratively, it provides the occasion for the confrontation between Snowball and Napoleon that leads to Snowball’s expulsion. Thematically, it demonstrates how a genuine progressive vision can be appropriated by an authoritarian regime: after expelling Snowball and denouncing the windmill, Napoleon adopts the plan as his own and uses the windmill’s construction as a tool of labor extraction and political control.

Q: How is Snowball different from Napoleon?

Snowball and Napoleon differ significantly in temperament, methods, and personal character. Snowball is eloquent where Napoleon is taciturn. Snowball engages in public debate where Napoleon manipulates behind the scenes. Snowball values education where Napoleon values enforcement. Snowball shows personal courage where Napoleon avoids risk. Snowball’s vision for the farm includes collective improvement through technology and literacy, while Napoleon’s vision centers on the consolidation of pig privileges. However, the novel argues that these real differences exist within a shared structural framework: both pigs assume the right to govern on the basis of their claimed intellectual superiority, and both participate in the establishment of a two-class system that concentrates power in the hands of the pig elite. The differences between them are differences of degree, not of structural position.

Q: Did Orwell support Trotsky or Trotskyism?

No. Orwell admired Trotsky’s intellectual brilliance and personal courage, and he sympathized with Trotsky as a victim of Stalinist persecution. But Orwell fundamentally disagreed with Trotsky’s organizational theory. Orwell’s 1939 review of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed praised the book’s analysis of Stalinist degeneration while criticizing Trotsky’s failure to question whether the Leninist vanguard-party model itself contained the seeds of that degeneration. Orwell’s consistent position, documented across his essays, journalism, and fiction, was that the solution to Stalinism was not better vanguard leadership (Trotsky’s position) but the abolition of vanguard leadership in favor of democratic, decentralized, worker-controlled socialism. Animal Farm dramatizes this position by showing that Snowball’s better vanguard leadership still operates within the same corrupted structure that produces Napoleon’s tyranny.

Q: What does Snowball symbolize in Animal Farm?

Snowball symbolizes the revolutionary idealist whose genuine commitment to progressive change is undermined by his participation in an organizational structure that concentrates power. On the allegorical level, he represents Leon Trotsky and the broader phenomenon of the defeated revolutionary whose ideas are stolen and whose legacy is demonized by the rival who prevails. On the thematic level, he represents the possibility that the revolution might have gone differently, a possibility the novel both acknowledges and complicates by showing that the “differently” would still have operated within the same vanguard framework that produces the revolution’s betrayal. Snowball symbolizes the hard truth that good intentions within a bad structure produce bad outcomes, and that the solution is structural reform, not better-intentioned leaders.

Q: How does Squealer change the story of Snowball?

Squealer changes the story of Snowball in escalating stages that demonstrate the mechanics of propaganda. First, he claims Napoleon invented the windmill plans and Snowball stole them. Then he attributes the windmill’s collapse to Snowball’s nocturnal sabotage. Then he announces that Snowball’s bravery at the Battle of the Cowshed was fabricated and that Snowball was actually fighting on Jones’s side. Finally, he reveals that Snowball was Jones’s secret agent all along. Each revision requires the animals to surrender a piece of their own memory, and each surrender makes the next revision easier. The progression demonstrates how propaganda works as a system: it does not require a single dramatic lie but a series of small surrenders that gradually erode the audience’s capacity to maintain any independent account of the past.

Q: What role does Snowball play in the Battle of the Cowshed?

Snowball is the primary military leader at the Battle of the Cowshed, which takes place in Chapter Four when the neighboring farmers, led by Jones, attempt to retake the farm. Snowball has studied Julius Caesar’s military campaigns and devised a tactical plan involving a feigned retreat followed by a counterattack. He personally leads the first charge, is wounded by pellets from Jones’s shotgun, and continues fighting despite his injuries. The animals win the battle largely due to Snowball’s strategic planning and personal bravery. He is awarded the decoration “Animal Hero, First Class.” The Battle of the Cowshed corresponds allegorically to the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1921, in which Trotsky’s leadership of the Red Army was instrumental in the Bolshevik victory over the White forces.

Q: Why is Snowball blamed for everything after his expulsion?

Snowball is blamed for everything because his absent presence serves a crucial political function for Napoleon’s regime. An authoritarian regime that claims to be building a perfect society must explain why the society is not yet perfect. If the explanation acknowledges the regime’s own failures, the regime loses legitimacy. If the explanation attributes all failures to an external enemy conspiring with internal traitors, then the failures become evidence of the regime’s necessity: only the regime can protect the population from the conspiracy. Snowball’s absent presence provides exactly this function. His alleged sabotage explains every crop failure, every construction setback, and every shortage, while simultaneously justifying Napoleon’s purges and the intensification of security measures. The pattern corresponds precisely to the Stalinist regime’s use of the Trotskyist conspiracy as an all-purpose explanation for the Soviet Union’s domestic failures.

Q: What is the significance of the dogs chasing Snowball?

The dogs chasing Snowball off the farm is the novel’s single most important scene for understanding its political argument. The scene occurs at exactly the moment when democratic process would have produced a result Napoleon did not want: Snowball is about to win the windmill vote. Napoleon’s deployment of the dogs represents the substitution of force for persuasion at the precise moment when persuasion fails to serve the interests of the power-holder. The dogs themselves, raised in secret from puppies Napoleon took from their mothers, represent the security apparatus that authoritarian leaders build in advance of the moment when they will need to impose their will by violence. The scene corresponds to the Soviet security services’ role in enforcing Stalin’s consolidation of power and represents Orwell’s analysis of how revolutionary political systems transition from democratic contestation to authoritarian control.

Q: Could Snowball have saved the revolution if he had stayed?

This is the question the novel provokes but ultimately answers in the negative. Snowball would have been a better leader than Napoleon: less violent, more consultative, more genuinely concerned with the animals’ welfare. A farm under Snowball’s leadership would have been significantly better for the animals. But the novel’s structural argument is that Snowball’s leadership, like Napoleon’s, would have operated within the vanguard framework in which the pigs govern and the other animals labor, and that this framework, regardless of who leads it, contains within it the potential for the reproduction of the inequalities the revolution was supposed to abolish. Snowball might have delayed the revolution’s degeneration, but the degeneration proceeds from the structure, not from the individual, and the structure is what both pigs share.

Q: How does Snowball’s character relate to themes in Orwell’s other works?

Snowball connects to Orwell’s broader preoccupation with the relationship between revolutionary idealism and institutional power. The vanguard-capture problem that Snowball embodies in Animal Farm is the same problem Orwell diagnoses in the later novel set in a totalitarian state, where the Party’s original revolutionary ideals have been entirely consumed by the institutional machinery of power. Snowball represents the early phase of this process, the phase in which the revolutionary’s genuine idealism coexists with the structural arrangements that will eventually consume it. The later novel’s treatment of how institutional power processes individual dissidence represents the mature phase, where the institution has fully absorbed the revolutionary ideology and operates purely in the service of its own perpetuation. Together, the two novels compose Orwell’s complete diagnosis of how revolutionary movements transform into totalitarian states.

Q: What can we learn from Snowball’s story today?

Snowball’s story teaches that the quality of individual leadership, while important, is less determinative of political outcomes than the structures within which leaders operate. A political system that concentrates power in the hands of a self-appointed elite will tend to produce authoritarianism regardless of the personal qualities of the individuals who compose that elite. This lesson applies beyond the specific context of Soviet communism to any political situation where power is concentrated without adequate structural checks. Snowball’s genuine virtues, his intelligence, courage, and public-spiritedness, were not sufficient to prevent the revolution’s betrayal because the organizational structure in which those virtues operated was designed, by its very architecture, to produce the concentration of power that made the betrayal possible. The lesson is that structural design matters more than individual character, and that democratic, decentralized institutions are more reliable safeguards against tyranny than the hope that good leaders will prevail over bad ones.

Q: What makes Snowball’s character analysis different from standard readings?

Standard readings of Snowball present him as the betrayed hero whose alternative leadership would have saved the revolution. This reading is emotionally satisfying but analytically shallow. It reduces the novel’s structural critique to a moral tale about good and bad individuals and implies that the revolution’s failure could have been prevented by the simple expedient of choosing the right leader. The more textually supported reading, the one this analysis advances, recognizes Snowball’s genuine virtues while identifying his structural complicity in the vanguard arrangement that produces the revolution’s betrayal. This reading is harder and less comfortable, but it captures the novel’s actual argument: that the problem is the system, not the individual, and that the solution requires structural change, not merely personnel change. Orwell’s preferred alternative was not Snowball over Napoleon; it was democratic self-governance over vanguard leadership of any kind.

Q: How does Snowball’s expulsion compare to real political purges?

Snowball’s expulsion follows the pattern of political purges across revolutionary and authoritarian regimes. The key elements include the premeditated preparation of instruments of force (Napoleon’s training of the dogs, corresponding to the development of secret police organizations), the timing of the purge at a moment when the democratic process threatens the power-holder’s interests (the windmill vote, corresponding to moments when political rivals gain dangerous levels of popular support), the subsequent rewriting of the purged individual’s history (Squealer’s revision of Snowball’s legacy, corresponding to the Stalinist revision of Trotsky’s role in the revolution), and the transformation of the purged individual into an all-purpose scapegoat whose alleged conspiracies explain every subsequent failure. This pattern appears in contexts ranging from the French Revolution’s Thermidorian reaction to various twentieth-century one-party states, and Orwell’s rendering of it in Animal Farm captures the structural logic with remarkable economy.