Orwell was a confirmed socialist until the day he died. But he was not a communist. Personally, I think had he lived long enough to visit to the US to see how the capitalist system worked here, he might have changed a lot of his socialist opinions. But he didn’t.
He did write about the actions of Stalinist in the US and UK who had lots of criticism of their nations and leaders during WWII but never a suggestion that anything was wrong in what proud Uncle Joe Stalin did in Mother Russia.
They engaged in horrible tactics to bully those who were unfaithful to Stalinism. They published biased news.
You can read it from Orwell’s own pen in a “deluxe” 50th anniversary edition of Animal Farm. It includes several forwards or afterwards that were written by Orwell for international editions (one of which may not have been published in his life time, if I recall the other was for a Hungarian edition).