Orwell was an idealist who in his early years saw socialism as a means of healing the world's ills. After Spain, and as he matured politically, the totalitarian dangers of Communism frightened him more and more. I like these observations about Orwell by Clive James:
"But the facts were hard at work on a mind whose salient virtue was its willingness to let them in...he had come to suspect that the democratic part [of bourgeois democracy] might depend on the bourgeois part." After scanning the whole of Orwell's writings, James continues: "...In this strictly chronological arrangement of his writings we can watch him gradually deconstructing his own ideology in deference to a set of principles."
"Animal Farm" and "1984" were clear warnings of the totalitarian dangers of Communism although Leftist intellectuals like Gore Vidal try to deny that to this day. But as Orwell himself wrote: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."