Listening to that audiobook from Thomas Ricks about Churchill and Orwell. Orwell was downright despondent for having been an ardent socialist, gone off to Spain to fight to see that Stalin's totalitarian secret police had taken over all the goodwill of the "Revolution" and hunted him and his fellows in the Left harder than the fought the Franco regime. He then returns to Britain and endures the idiocy of appeasement and folly of the Colonel Blimpish failures of the first 2 years of the war. He knew that Stalin was not to be trusted at all...he came to appreciate Churchill for being willing to throw away the British class system in favor of national survival.
Now I bring that up because Orwell was cursed with knowledge and among those whose curse was ignorance.