Snowball (Animal Farm)

Orwell depicts Snowball in a sympathetic manner and superior to Napoleon in regards to personal intellect, rhetorical skills, economic theories, literary writings and military leadership.

The personality traits and eventual defeat of Snowball mirrored the life of his historical counterpart Trotsky, including his contributions to the early Soviet Union and forced exile.

The first note of corruption was struck when the pigs secretly had the cows’ milk added to their own mash and Snowball consented to this first act of inequity.”[2] However, literary critic Jeffrey Meyers who reviewed the political allegories in Orwell’s work stated that: "Orwell ignores the fact that Trotsky passionately opposed Stalin’s dictatorship from 1924 to 1940, which featured Siberian prison camps, the deliberately created Ukraine famine and the massive slaughter during the Moscow Purge Trials of 1937.” [3]Meyers also added that Orwell drew on the views of a right-wing combatant to reinforce his arguments.

In contrast, Meyers cited historian Isaac Deutscher's biographical account of Trotsky which presented him to be a much more civilised figure than Stalin and suggested that he would not have purged the Red Army generals or millions of Soviet citizens.

The parody sequel novel Snowball's Chance depicts Snowball's return to the farm following Napoleon's death, and portrays him as having become a capitalist whose leadership mirrors the United States instead of Soviet Russia, culminating in him declaring war on a community of fanatical woodland animals after they destroy twin windmills built under his rule.