What is the connection between dictatorships and George Orwell's allegorical depiction of an autocratic society through Animal Farm?

George Orwell's Animal Farm is an allegorical tale in which farm animals assume the roles otherwise occupied by human beings. Orwell, whose 1984 continues to stand as the seminal depiction of a totalitarian society in which independent thought is crushed and the ruling regime employs propaganda and the perversion of education to control the public, wrote Animal Farm as an indictment of the perversion of the Russian Revolution of 1917. As students of Russian history know, there were two "revolutions" in Russia that year, the first, in February, removed the czar and his family from power and replaced it with a Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky, a somewhat moderate socialist. The second revolution is the one familiar to most, the Bolshevik Revolution that removed the Provisional Government and installed the brutal and enormously autocratic figures such as Lenin, Trotsky, and, of particular significance, Stalin, to the top echelons of Russian government. It was the political machinations of such figures, especially Stalin following Lenin's death, that inspired Orwell's novella.

In Animal Farm, the animals revolt against their human master and pledge allegiance to a more equitable society in which all animals are equal. The animals agree to comply with seven commandments, the last of which states that "All animals are equal." The pigs, however, conspire to fill the leadership vacuum created by the farmer's forced departure, and it is the machinations of the pigs, particularly Napoleon, Squealer and Snowball, that represent those of Stalin and his allies (most of whom would eventually be victims of Stalin's paranoia and maliciousness). As Napoleon and Snowball struggle against each other for supremacy, the former emerges on top. It is then that Napoleon, representing the figure of Joseph Stalin, truly subverts the principles of the original revolution by moving to consolidate his position as leader--a move that thoroughly undermines the notion of equality among all animals. Once entrenched in power, Napoleon is free to replace the seven commandments with the only one that truly matters: "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS."

The concept of "first among equals" would become a defining characteristic of the dictatorship that ruled the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or U.S.S.R. In this, Orwell was borrowing an old Latin adage, primus inter pares, or first among equals, to illuminate the extent to which the pigs, led by Napoleon, have succeeded in undermining the founding principles of the revolution. Equality is reduced to a slogan with no grounding in reality. What transpired in Soviet Russia following the February 1917 revolution would be repeated in countries like Cuba, where the 1959 popular revolt against Fulgencio Batista would be subverted by the thoroughly dictatorial Fidel Castro and his Argentine ally, Che Guevara, and in Nicaragua, where a successful revolution in 1979 to overthrow one dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was similarly subverted by the Marxist Sandinista movement.

Animal Farm is entirely about the tendency of the better organized, more ruthless among revolutionary movements to undermine other factions or individuals involved in those movements and to impose, once in power, a form of dictatorship usually more brutal than the one it replaced. Orwell intended his allegory to constitute a warning against those who would take too lightly the truly autocratic among themselves. The pigs in Orwell's story lead a revolt against humans, but assume the posture of dictators in their own right.