On July 13, 1944, T.S. Eliot, then editorial director of the London publishing house Faber Faber, wrote to George Orwell to reject a manuscript he had submitted. “We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing,” Eliot hastened to say of Orwell’s fable of talking animals who take over an English farm. Yet, he continued, he doubted “that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.”

In other words, Eliot, who was the consummate Tory, did not want to upset Britain’s Soviet allies. Besides, he added, the pigs of the fable, being the smartest of the critters on the farm, were really the best qualified to run the place, which gives us some idea of where Eliot’s politics lay.

The pigs of Animal Farm are smart indeed. They see to it that the communist idyll that the animals in their collectivity inaugurate after throwing abusive farmer Jones off his property degenerates into a swineocracy that benefits only their kind, employing the purges, assassinations, and side deals of Josef Stalin’s real-world Soviet Union. On the surface, Animal Farm is a simple fable of geese and rabbits and ponies and such in the manner of Beatrix Potter’s stories. Look closer, and in it we find an unmistakable Stalin in the pig Napoleon, Leon Trotsky in his rival Snowball, and a world of oppressed and befuddled creatures in the echelons below, some blindly loyal to the pigs’ regime, some questioning, most happy enough to join in the bleated chant of the simple-minded sheep: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” By the end of the book, after the pigs’ counterrevolution takes place, the sheep have a different chant: “Four legs good, two legs better.” Naturally—or, rather, unnaturally—the pigs have by then learned to walk upright, and now they carry whips by which to command such homage.

Animal Farm was published in 1945. As Eliot feared, it offended Stalin, though Orwell’s real objects of contempt were all political systems in which one class of human (or barnyard animal) is privileged over another, which describes capitalism just as much as it does communism. That didn’t keep the CIA from putting it to work in the Cold War, funding an animated, for-kiddies film version in 1954, a project that involved a certain E. Howard Hunt (of Watergate fame). Ever since, the political right has tried to claim Orwell as one of its own, an irony given Orwell’s resolutely leftist views.

The totalitarian impulse is as strong around the world now as it was a century ago, when the events began to brew that would find their ways into Orwell’s books, including the one in which all animals are equal on paper but more equal than others in reality. Animal Farm is a classic of English literature. The 75th anniversary of its publication may be a modest footnote in literary history, but it seems a good occasion to reread Animal Farm and consider all the horrors that have taken place in the years since in the name of the boss hogs, old and new.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.