[Intermernet]

Just nitpicking here, but 1984 is a critique of totalitarianism. The only references to systems of government in the book refer to "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists".

Orwell was a democratic socialist. He was opposed to totalitarian politics, not communism per se.

[ants_everywhere]

It's true that it's about totalitarianism to some extent. But we have Orwell's actual words here that it's chiefly about communism

> [Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

And of course Animal Farm is only about communism (as opposed to communism + fascism). And the lesser known Homage to Catalonia depicts the communist suppression of other socialist groups.

By all this I just mean to say when you're reading Nineteen Eighty-Four what he's describing is barely a fictionalization of what was already going on in the Soviet Union. There's just not a lot in the book that is specifically Nazi or Fascist.

I don't have any opinion on whether he thought there were non-totalitarian forms of communism.

[justsomejew]

I think that Orwell understood his own people much more than Russians, so it might be useful, while reading him, to take a look at the mirror as well..