Orwell was persona non grata in the USSR by 1945, the time of Animal Farm's publication. Orwell had been tried in absentia by the POUM in Spain for the ideological deviance of being a Trotskyite. Although the Soviet Union would only allow legal publication of 1984 in 1989, the critical acclaim its original publication received necessitated a degree of reaction from Soviet cultural officials and their fellow travelers in the West. Most of these critiques are trenchant exercises in completely missing the Orwell's point.

For example, I. Anisimov's May 1950 review in Pravda asserted Orwell's dystopia was component of American propaganda:

It is clear that Orwell’s filthy book is in the spirit of such a vital organ of American propaganda as the Reader’s Digest which published this work, and Life which presented it with many illustrations. Thus, gruesome prognostications, which are being made in our times by a whole army of venal writers on the orders and instigation of Wall Street, are real attacks against the people of the world…

The Pravda review concluded with a truly Orwellian paean to the USSR:

The living forces of peace are uniting ever more firmly into an organized front in defense of peace, freedom and life. They are the only hope man has for the salvation of culture. Led by the Soviet Union, these forces are mighty and indomitable. They will assure mankind happiness and prosperity despite the monstrous intrigues of the imperialists, the instigators of war.

Samuel Sillen, one of the Communist party USA's cultural intellectuals, had a similarly hysteric misreading of 1984

Not even the robots of Orwell’s dyspeptic vision of the world in 1984 seem as solidly regimented as the freedom-shouters who chose it for the Book of the Month Club, serialized it in Reader’s Digest, illustrated it in eight pages of Life, and wrote pious homilies on it in Partisan Review and the New York Times. Indeed the response is far more significant than the book itself; it demonstrates that Orwell’s sickness is epidemic.

After invoking Orwell's Trotskyite betrayal of antifascism in Spain, Sillen portrays 1984 as a sign of the imminent collapse of capitalism:

The bourgeoisie, in its younger days, could find spokesmen who painted rosy visions of the future. In its decay, surrounded by burgeoning socialism, it is capable only of hate-filled, dehumanized anti-Utopias. Confidence has given way to the nihilistic literature of the graveyard. Now that Ezra Pound has been given a government award [Pound had conducted propaganda broadcasts for Mussolini] and George Orwell has become a best-seller we would seem to have reached bottom. But there is a hideous ingenuity in the perversions of a dying capitalism, and it will keep probing for new depths of rottenness which the maggots will find "brilliant and morally invigorating."

Nor were these aspersions against Orwell limited just to the US and and USSR; Orwell's Britain had a number of intellectuals critiquing Orwell's betrayal and his popularity among anti-communists. E. P. Thompson would accuse Orwell of being ignorant of the "deformities" of the Communist system and Orwell conflated them with "the nature and function of the movement itself." A 1956 review in Marxist Quarterly by James Walsh continues to assert Orwell was "a mouthpiece for some of the most deep-seated petit-bourgeois illusions" and:

Orwell’s neurotic hatreds are revealed: continental socialism which has brought even its decimal system, steel-and-glass industrialism, the smell of the lower classes. This dismal trial of prejudice continues right through the book; this sensitive soul of the middle class Orwell has been bruised by capitalism, which he hates, and by socialism, which he hates more. He joins the socialist movement for a while, long enough to learn a few superficial facts about it, and then runs shrieking into the arms of the capitalist publishers with a couple of horror comics which bring him fame and fortune, and recognition of his individuality and love of freedom.

Perhaps most strange is the British-based emigre journalist Isaac Deutscher who contended in a 1955 essay on Orwell that he was provincial Englishman without any practical experience of Marxism, so he naturally could not see the rational behind the Stalinist purges.

Many of these critiques would zero in on Orwell's alleged complicity within the British empire (which begs the question did they read Burmese Days!). For example, Walsh sneers Orwell was "petty colonial dictator and as a minor official in the main capitalist propaganda agency." Sillen was less subtle:

The author of this cynical rot is quite a hero himself. He served for five years in the Indian Imperial Police, an excellent training center for dealing with the "proles."

These critiques were an unsubtle ideological attacks on Orwell and quite frankly hatchet jobs (Sillen mistakenly declares Winston is shot at the end of 1984). In reflexively attacking him for abandoning the cause in such a patent and crude manner, the inadvertently proved Orwell's point.

Sources

Caute, David. Politics and the Novel During the Cold War. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2010.

Meyers, Jeffrey, editor. George Orwell: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 2011.