You don't need to read his novels to guess what his politics were, he wrote plenty about them, in the first person. He was pretty left-wing, he just also hated Stalinism and authoritarianism generally.

You are of course free to think that Stalinism in the 1984 style is the inevitable endgame of leftism, but it's very very clear that Orwell didn't think so.

this is what I mean. a complete - bordering on deliberate - misunderstanding of everything the man stood for. have you read any of his other books?

Orwell was literally a self-described proponent of democratic socialism.