What is the relationship between the pigs and the other animals in animal farm

The pigs in Animal Farm are the dominant, most intelligent group: the leaders. They carry out the overthrow of the human ownership of the farm, directing the actions of the other animals and eventually bullying them and exploiting them, just as humans have exploited animals as a whole in the traditional order of the world.
It is interesting that in the actual Russian Revolution, of which Animal Farm is an allegory, the Bolshevik Party, the real-life equivalent of the pigs, represented only a small minority of the Russian people. Though Soviet historians, of course, and most other left-wing commentators represented this situation much differently, more recent historiography in general recognizes that the Bolsheviks had little popular support and were able to seize power in a vacuum, given that the other political parties were less organized and less ruthless. Orwell, a socialist himself, does not quite conceive of the pigs this way, showing the "revolutionary" movement as starting out with good intentions but then deteriorating once the chief "bad" pig, Napoleon (i.e., Stalin) takes over and kicks out the "good" pig, Snowball (Trotsky). But the fact that Orwell specifically uses pigs to represent the Bolsheviks as a whole shows that the political left (or at least Orwell himself) by the 1940s realized that the Revolution had been spearheaded by people who were greedy (as pigs in the real world are usually thought of) for power, and that power-lust was their motivation more than genuine concern about the working class, who are represented by the rest of the animals in Orwell's parable.