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It is easier to understand the popularity if you imagine the support was for Marxism, since plenty of the intelligencia (mostly in humanities?) still publicly support Marxism.
The word "communism" has changed its meaning over time - especially in the USA.
Eric Blair (George Orwell) was not a supporter of communism - he used the word "socialist" for his beliefs and he fought with the "anarchists" in Spain. Both of those political words have changed their meaning too.
Animal Farm was written by him and his wife[1] as a satire of communism because a direct criticism was not palatable at the time. Eric also experienced the Soviet Union undermining a revolution - he wrote about this in Homage to Catalonia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606380
The most bizarre story is the CIA funding[2] the UK animated version of Animal Farm so that they could change the script for propoganda purposes: "To meet the CIA's objectives, the ending was changed to show that only the pigs had become totally corrupt. The film ends with other animals mounting a successful revolt against their rulers. There is no mention of the humans in the film's conclusion."
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-12/anna-funder-new-book-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/mar/07/artsfeatures...
Orwell fought for the POUM militias during the Spanish civil war. The POUM was a communist party opposed to the CPE - Communist Party of Spain (the CPE was part of the Comintern - that's an organization in faraway Moscow)
I think that Orwell identified with the politics of the POUM, from reading 'Homage to Catalonia' (also he could have joined an anarchist militia instead)
Now POUM was actually bigger than the CPE, until it was suppressed by the CPE and the NKVD (Soviet secret police, later renamed into KGB)
Communists is now the word often used to label Marxists . . . You are entirely making my point for me that calling him a communist is incorrect - I am fairly sure he doesn't use the word "communist" towards himself - he writes about socialism and calls himself a socialist (another word that has been debased in the US).
The POUM and PSUC were on the same team to begin with - later they fought against each other - see link in my previous comment. Your comment doesn't fit what I have read from the book: I have read Homage to Catalonia multiple times. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/george-orwell-homage... and here is a relevant section:
[He said] "Those are the Socialists" (meaning the P.S.U.C.), I was puzzled and said: "Aren’t we all Socialists?" I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate parties; my attitude always was, "Why can’t we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?" This of course was the correct ’anti-Fascist’ attitude which had been carefully disseminated by the English newspapers, largely in order to prevent people from grasping the real nature of the struggle. But in Spain, especially in Catalonia, it was an attitude that no one could or did keep up indefinitely. Everyone, however unwillingly, took sides sooner or later. For even if one cared nothing for the political parties and their conflicting ‘lines’, it was too obvious that one’s own destiny was involved. As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories. When I scrounged for firewood on the mountainside and wondered whether this was really a war or whether the News Chronicle had made it up, when I dodged the Communist machine-guns in the Barcelona riots, when I finally fled from Spain with the police one jump behind me — all these things happened to me in that particular way because I was serving in the P.O.U.M. militia and not in the P.S.U.C. So great is the difference between two sets of initials!
The leader of POUM was Andreu Nin, he was a communist, as most of the leadership in his party. That makes it a communist party, even if it was not allied with Moscow.
Marxist could mean all sorts of things: the early Marx is very different from the late Marx, so is the social democratic interpretation of Marxism.
i think that the distinction between Pro-Moscow and not Moscow based communist makes more sense, given these different gradations of Marxism.
They were always odd bedfellows, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend (at least temporarily), and it's sensible not to antagonize your friend when you're both engaged in literal mortal combat against the enemy.
On the other hand the british and american intellectual class saw the USSR as worthy of emulation. They wanted a Stalinist regime in Britain/America.