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.