Animal Farm satire not at all gentle upon a particular State—Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years time perhaps, "Animal Farm" may be simply a fairy story, today it is a political satire with a good deal of point." "Animal Farm" has been subject to much comment in the decades since these early remarks. The pigs Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer adapt Old Major's ideas into "a complete system of
Animal Farm it; however, they did not, and "lectured Orwell on what they perceived to be errors in "Animal Farm"." In his "London Letter" on 17 April 1944 for "Partisan Review", Orwell wrote that it was "now next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed. Anti-Russian books do appear, but mostly from Catholic publishing firms and always from a religious or frankly reactionary angle." The publisher Jonathan Cape, who had initially accepted "Animal Farm", subsequently rejected the book after an official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off—although the civil servant who it is assumed gave the order