A new edition of Orwell's savage satire of the Soviet Revolution, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D.J. Taylor. First published in 1945, just as the allied forces had begun to parcel up the post-war world, Orwell's satire of the Soviet Revolution was instantly acclaimed as a Cold War classic. Set in the English countryside in the early years of the twentieth century, this is the story of a rebellion that fails, carried out by revolutionaries who all too swiftly turn into the thing they were trying to destroy.