Originally Posted by
Mr Soul '68
Orwell was nearly killed by the communists when fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The leftist political party with whose militia he served (the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, an anti-Stalinist communist party) was declared an illegal organisation by the communists, and Orwell was consequently forced to flee Spain. Orwell did not know that two months before he arrived in Spain, the [Soviet law enforcement agency] NKVD's resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had assured NKVD Headquarters, 'the Trotskyist organisation POUM can easily be liquidated'—by those Communists, whom Orwell took to be allies in the fight against Franco.
Thus he became aware of how powerful and vile the Russian Communists were, and had an intense dislike for them for them the rest of his life. I don't blame him at all for dobbing in misguided fools who thought communism was the way forward. Remember that Stalin killed far more of his own people than Hitler ever did in the WW II