Napoleon, pig-in-charge of Animal Farm, commands that in addition to rebuilding the windmill--the original one having been dynamited in the recent battle--a schoolhouse for piglets is to be constructed. Financing for these projects and the other necessities of the farm will come from the sale of potatoes and nearly every egg the hens lay. The hens, compliant at most times, but now fearful for their future chicks, rebel against this directive by withholding their eggs. Napoleon's solution to their disobedience is to starve them into submission. Animal Farm is Orwell’s fable of Stalinist totalitarianism; the hens incident signifies Stalin’s persecution of the USSR’s marginally more prosperous peasants, the Kulaks.