It's worth remembering that Orwell was a socialist, a leftist, and was anti authoritarian not anti communist. (Which isn't opposed to your comment, the Soviet Union was authoritarian.)
It just gets brought up so often that because he was anti Soviet, he must be anti communist, which wasn't the case.
He was always socialist, but ended up as anti-communist after the Spanish civil war, during which while fighting for the Marxist POUM he had to flee a Stalinist purge.
(Americans love to flatten all left parties into "communist", ignoring the rich history of ideological differences and occasionally violent purges)
Anti communist or anti Stalinist? Or even anti Marxist-Leninist?
Homage is a complicated book to place because it's been interpreted so baby different ways across eras. But it's hard to imagine someone going and fighting for POUM and praising them post facto would ultimately be anti communist across all flavors of communism.
See: his memoir "Homage to Catalonia," wherein he worked with the Communist Party of Great Britain to get him into Spain during the Spanish Civil War, where he fought with the POUM, a Spanish anti-Stalinist communist party (though he would admit that this was mostly by chance, and he himself was more aligned with the anarchists).
He would say later, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...)
