Virtually every detail in 'Animal Farm' allegorizes some incident in that history: the Kronstadt rebellion, the five-year plan, the Moscow trials, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Tehran conference. Howard Hunt at least kept the story pegged to the history of the Soviet Union, which is what Orwell intended. The great enemy of propaganda was subjected, after his death, to the deceptions and evasions of propaganda-and by the very people, American Cold Warriors, who would canonize him as the great enemy of propaganda. A new ending was provided, in which the animals storm the farmhouse where the pigs have moved and liberate themselves all over again. The book's final scene, in which the pigs (the Bolsheviks, in Orwell's allegory) can no longer be distinguished from the animals' previous exploiters, the humans (the capitalists), was omitted. (Howard Hunt was the agent on the case) secretly bought the film rights to 'Animal Farm' from his widow, Sonia, and had an animated-film version produced in England, which it distributed throughout the world. Frances Stonor Saunders, in her fascinating study 'The Cultural Cold War,' reports that right after Orwell's death the C.I.A. Orwell was fatally ill with pulmonary tuberculosis when he wrote it, and he died in January, 1950. '1984,' published four years later, had even greater success. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection it was quickly translated into many languages and distributed, in some countries, by the United States government and it made Orwell, who had spent most of his life scraping by, famous and rich.

'Animal Farm' was an instant success in England and the United States.

Orwell had trouble finding a publisher, though, and by the time the book finally appeared, in August, 1945, the month of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the Cold War was already on the horizon. It was a warning against dealing with Stalin and, in the circumstances, a prescient book. 'Animal Farm,' George Orwell's satire, which became the Cold War 'Candide,' was finished in 1944, the high point of the Soviet-Western alliance against fascism.

George orwell animal farm and 1984