The axe forgets, but the tree remembers: How ‘Andor’ reflects history, from revolutionary Russia to modern-day Gaza Premium

Tony Gilroy's Andor on Disney+ is a radical, subversive take on rebellion, drawing from real-world history and current events.

There’s a scandalously radical something currently streaming on Disney+. It’s a granular, more subversive vision that has been grounding the grandiose space operatics of that beloved galaxy far, far away. This is something about rebellion, yes, but also about its gestation. It’s about the indignities, the betrayals, and the atrocities that make revolution inevitable and necessary. This brilliant something is Tony Gilroy’s Andor.

Among the many surprises tucked into Gilroy’s slow-burning espionage thriller masquerading as ‘a Star Wars story’, is how intimately the show understands the anatomy of rebellion. It’s not surprising that he points to The Battle of Algiers as his biggest influence. Gillo Pontecorvo’s Golden Lion-winner from 1966 is about ordinary people slowly learning how to push back, and the machinery that tries to crush them for it. Andor lifts from that idea to anatomise its rebellion. If Star Wars was once about hope, Andor is about praxis. It’s about how rebellion is forged. That Andor has always felt the least like Star Wars has actually been the best thing about it. What it examines are the more combustible materials of history —  bureaucracy, surveillance, police states, prison labour, and the everyday banality of evil that Hannah Arendt once named with terrifying clarity.

Take, for instance, the Russian Revolution. The workers’ uprisings in the factories of Petrograd are mirrored in the communal defiance that brews in the working-class Ferrix, where we see people pushed to the brink by small humiliations. Like Lenin’s early Bolsheviks, the citizens of Ferrix operate in coded signals and public silences.

Cassian Andor himself seems to echo a young Joseph Stalin — not yet the dictator, but the furtive conspirator, the romantic outlaw raised in hardship, slipping through borders, organising sabotage, and always ducking the eye of empire. Stalin, like Cassian, started out only with self-preservation in mind. Meanwhile, the seasoned Marxist-Leninist Luthen Rael —  the one who delivers that speech about burning your life so someone else can feel the warmth of a distant dawn — embodies the belief that you must first seize power, often through the master’s tools, to build anew. Reflections of a wise Lenin radicalising the impressionable Stalin during the Bolshevik Revolution are discernible in Luthen and Cassian’s dynamic, and by the time Cassian leads a breakout from the sterile panopticon hell of the Narkina 5 labour camp, he’s finally beginning to understand the contours of revolution.

Narkina 5 itself reads like a historical palimpsest. The white-on-white Imperial gulag conjures the sugar plantations of colonial Haiti. In a direct echo of Saint-Domingue under French rule, where enslaved Africans operated sugar mills in rotating teams, the prisoners at Narkina 5 are slaves in all but name. And in Kino Loy, the foreman-turned-martyr, we find shades of Toussaint Louverture — the Haitian general who began as a reformist and ended a revolutionary — caught in the middle as both victim and enforcer, who finally rises to liberate others even when he cannot liberate himself.

There’s also a whisper of South Africa here — of the ANC and its covert networks, and of Mandela’s long walk through compromise and confrontation. Mon Mothma embodies the internal fracturing of revolutionary thought. Like many liberal allies in apartheid-era South Africa, she hopes to work within the system and reform it gently, but Gilroy soon demonstrates the failure of soft resistance. Mothma is pushed to the margins and forced to make awful choices — including arranging her daughter’s marriage to ensure funding for the Rebellion. Meanwhile, the privileged insurgent Vel recalls Patty Hearst — the heiress turned radical whose alliance with the Symbionese Liberation Army remains one of the more complicated chapters in America’s revolutionary folklore. Like Hearst, Vel complicates ideas of ideological purity as both insider and class traitor, and she reminds us that revolutions often enlist allies from the very echelons they seek to dismantle.

Yet, Saw Gerrera is still by far the most fractured reflection in Andor’smirror of revolution. Part Che Guevara, part Buenaventura Durruti, part Prabhakaran, part Malcolm X, he’s the rebel forged from the fallout of real-world insurrections. Saw’s furious roll call of rival rebel factions in Season 1 also mirrors the internecine rifts that have splintered leftist movements throughout history. The in-fighting among anarchists, communists, Trotskyists, and moderate republicans, who all opposed Francisco Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War, is perhaps the clearest parallel that a wounded and disillusioned George Orwell chronicled in Homage to Catalonia.