It would be relevant if we were voting for/against him.

It's not that relevant for appreciating his work.

Depends if those socialists are attempting to set up some kind of revolution that results in Ingsoc

Yeah, nah:

> The list includes dozens of suspected communists, “crypto-communists,” socialists, “fellow travelers,” and even LGBT people and Jews

The point is both Animal Farm and 1984 are about Stalin's Russia, not about a Western country, and the attempted proletarian revolution in 1984 is against communism.

On your reading maybe. If Orwell wanted to set 1984 in Stalin’s Russia then he would have done

It never occurred to me that it could be read another way, but apparently people have different interpretations [1]. Asimov's review [2] seems to support my interpretation, too:

> It was most popular at first with people who leaned towards the conservative side of the political spectrum, for it was clearly an anti-Soviet polemic, and the picture of life it projected in the London of 1984 was very much as conservatives imagined life in the Moscow of 1949 to be.

[1] https://fee.org/articles/orwell-s-1984-how-to-misread-a-clas...

[2] http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

I read it, totally unprompted by school, when I was a teenager and was pretty stunned by it. I didn’t see it as a tome about Stalinism at all because I didn’t know about Stalinism then, but instead read it as something much more profoundly universal. Even profoundly British too, I think it could have been written without any influence from Stalinism even though in later years I see the obvious parallels and influences of that particular issue. The fact remains that I think there’s something much more profound about humanity in the collective than warrants a strictly Stalinist or communist reading. What it says about the structure of human societies is fairly common and universal - doesn’t take a spin on a Marxist reading to think it’s just repeating that class analysis.

It doesn't change the message of his work, does it?