The Epstein Thing Is Not What Makes Chomsky Wrong About Lenin, but It Does Explain Why [KKF longread]

Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on UpScrolled, Twitter and YouTube.

The way Noam Chomsky was exposed in the Epstein files says something not only about Chomsky himself, but also holds a mirror up to the Western left, reflecting the limits of their advocacy they have chosen since being on the same side of the Cold War fronts and still with the largest capitalists, investors and beneficiaries of the Western-led world order to this day.

Noam Chomsky’s position on the Bolsheviks and the USSR: “Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement,” has long haunted me.

I don’t think the question of whether Chomsky is ideologically right or wrong is long settled: of course not. But this was not the case for the first couple of years; for me, in my personal political evolution, the question he posed was of fundamental importance. His critique seemed valid, and I kept it in mind until I’d formed my own and understood where Chomsky was wrong and what the catch was that made his argument dishonest. Below, I will explain how Chomsky’s assertion, judging participants in historical processes based on the outcomes of historical processes, violates the basic rules of historicism and logic, and why, in my view, he was deliberately dishonest.

As is often the case with the most dangerous lies, Chomsky’s accusation is half true and half false. The true half: to say that Lenin, the Bolshevik Party, and the USSR ultimately turned out to be a right-wing version of Marxist socialism is correct. But the way I have formulated it (“ultimately turned out to be”) includes and takes into account the implication of historical process, dynamics; it implies a contradiction with the starting position (Lenin and the Bolshevik Party *became* a right-wing, more reactionary version of socialism *in the course of* the historical process), making a referral to the dialectical nature of the historical process.

I regularly and relentlessly argue with those who claim that Stalin’s USSR was a fascist regime. False equivocation of socialism/communism even in their worst historical shape with fascism/nazism was and remains a fascist self-report.

But I would not argue with the assertion that Stalin’s USSR had some directionally fascist tendencies, i.e. developed an unfortunate (and ultimately self-defeating) right-wing bias in its cultural and, in part, national policies, most notably. Because, in such a ...