Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist — essentially a Trotskyist, or at least allied with Trotskyists. He saw what Stalinists were like while fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Stalinists fought the Trotskyists harder than they fought Franco.

Then Orwell saw millions of Englishmen fall for Stalin after WW2, when times were desperate in England. Orwell was genuinely afraid Stalinists would rise to power in England. And Stalinists did infiltrate the highest levels of government in the U.K. It wasn’t until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 that public opinion in the U.K. firmly turned against Stalin.