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 formulation, there is no longer an assertion of some “nature” of Soviet socialism (meaningless in the materialistic historical analysis anyway), but rather a descriptive presentation of the dynamics of historical processes in specific historical circumstances.

The right-wing evolution of the Bolshevik politics and the Soviet regime is an inevitable consequence of the dialectical nature of history, and indeed of any conflict, where the flip side of mutual negation is mutual influence. Stalin’s reactionary turn in the 1930s was undoubtedly a fascistization of the regime, caused by the struggle for survival against literal fascism (which arose in the West in response to the success of the October Revolution of 1917, meaning the fascistization of capitalism also occurred not spontaneously, but dialectically).

An anarchic hippie commune, threatened by a gang of thugs, in a vacuum, will inevitably become more militant than it is compatible with maintaining the anarchist fundamentals in order to survive. This was the point of world revolution: socialism, and especially communism, is impossible in competition with a more reactionary system, and only becomes viable as a complete replacement to such a system—it requires a mutual disarmament. One can’t play football if one team comes onto the field with balls and the other with swords. Either both teams disarm, or it will be a battle, not a game. But how do you disarm a team that refuses to disarm and prefers to win by hacking its opponents to pieces? The choice here is either surrender, or trade balls for swords and try to win the fight. But either way, there will be no football.

It requires a certain collective leap of faith, so to say. Otherwise, the need to defend oneself according to the rules of the old world against the old world will make any attempt to build a new world within the old world framework somewhat impossible. Building something truly new, a new way of life in this world, requires the world united in that will.

Chomsky fails to understand this dynamic when he claims that Lenin and the Soviet project were right-wing. They moved rightward, yes. But they were never right-wing, and the Bolsheviks of October 1917 are further left than anything leftist in the West today, including Chomsky himself, if only because none of them moonlighted as advisors to pedophile grand dukes or held a candle to aristocrats hunting ballerinas.

The “Trotskyists” also fail to understand this dynamic: while rightly criticizing Stalinism for its fascistization, they nullify the value of their critique with the initial assumption that the problem lies in Stalin’s intra-party victory, not Trotsky’s, i.e., reducing everything to the struggle of personalities in history and ignoring history itself—otherwise they wouldn’t be Trotskyists. And, of course, this isn’t understood by the “Stalinists,” who, accepting the fascistization of Stalinism as a given, believe that we must begin with fascism right away. If both had mastered dialectics, this pseudo-schism simply wouldn’t exist.

Therefore, Chomsky’s discovery in the Epstein Files adds nothing to the ideological disagreement with him—he’s wrong objectively, i.e., independently of it. But it adds to Chomsky’s own portrait: the stern old man was implacable toward Lenin’s right-wing policies, confronted with civil war at home, foreign intervention, and the revolutionary weakness of the Western working class, which had left the Russian Revolution to deal with it all alone.

Yet he found reason to be sympathetic to the pure demon of the bourgeoisie, too criminal for the inherently class-based bourgeois legal system. He’s like the leftist among Hitler’s advisers, unable to bear Stalin’s betrayal of the ideological purity of socialism.

But it was not Chomsky’s failure to understand that where the Soviet project ended up was not the same as what it was about that was the mystery. Many make this kind of mistake. The mystery was how Noam was able to recognize this fallacy and shoot it down on the spot easily in almost every other case, like when it came for criticism of Palestinian resistance for example. The same case can be made and is being made against Hamas: “Hamas is too right-wing, too reactionary”—even though Hamas didn’t even start as an armed resistance, and it’s pointless to “condemn Hamas” separately from analyzing conditions that produced Hamas. And Chomsky would have no problem to correctly and poignantly explain it, providing an excellent materialist and dialectical analysis when it comes to Hamas, or Taliban, or Iranian Ayatollahs—which makes his selective blindness when it comes to the same dynamic played out after the Russian Revolution in the USSR history that more sus… or made, before I saw what kind of relationships Noam Chomsky had with Jeffrey Epstein.

The difference is that Hamas is far from being in power and threatening the Western world order. Chomsky could exercise full power of the Marxist analysis there without spooking his benefactors too much. But the USSR was too real and too powerful for him to be equally as honest.

In a similar fashion Chomsky would throw under the bus Venezuelan regime as well.

🇵🇸 no war but class war 🏳️‍🌈@EgorKotkin

Omg. I feel like this one thing has knocked about a third of my otherwise previously fairly stable respect for Noam Chomsky alone.

5:55 PM · Jan 31, 2026 · 1.36K Views

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1 Reply · 4 Likes

The point is not the Venezuelan regime being or not being sufficiently “by the book” socialist—no one was, and no one should have been—not without the Western left, who failed to show up for the world revolution, and, with the imperial core of the West pertaining, continued to criticize their comrades in Russia and China for not doing socialism “the right way” from its comforts instead.

The point is the servile nature of Chomsky’s commentary in private when it might hit too close to home for the Western elites: do not have any doubts, going full imperialist against Venezuela, even “the left” do not claim them as their own, per the leftiest of the left, comrade Chomsky himself.

Deprived of the dialectical materialism depth of analysis, it loses the sight of the historic reality that the whole “the USSR-style” socialism only happened because only in Russia socialists actually came through with the whole revolution thing only to found themselves alone against the world’s most dangerous threat ever, this faux-radicalism ends up being flattened into the simple, one-dimensional designations, and in effect becomes just another kind of liberal purity bullshit. This “Chomsky-kind” of socialism can be conditionally called democratic socialism, because even in its name it emphasizes that “we are not like the other, undemocratic, bad, bad socialists,” which is, at the closer examination through an actually dialectically materialist lens, becomes a false distinction.

The dialectical perspective, in fact, melts the fissure between the “tankies” and “democratic socialists” away: ideologically there is and was no difference. Lenin’s project was as democratic as Bernie’s and Zohran’s in theory. Bolshevik Russia after the revolution was as progressive as modern liberals can only dream of in practice, including cultural and social liberalism—including queer issues, for which I recommend two videos by revolutionaryth0t: “Gender-affirming care in the Soviet Union” and “Why did the USSR (re-)criminalize homosexuality?”:

The real issue never was about lacking of the good intentions, that are modern Western left are so proud of having, but doing it alone on the ruins of the agrarian Russian empire against the world’s most developed villains, which went just as bad in practice as the theoretically undisputed necessity for world revolution would suggest.

The toxic nature of the “Chomsky” interpretation of socialism allows the failure of the Soviet project to be attributed to some predetermined outcome of Russian socialism. And now it similarly poisons the Western left’s perception of China and the contribution of Chinese comrades to humanity’s common struggle against barbarism.

And I think it’s about time to a admit that and bury the hatchet between the “tankies” and “democratic socialists.” But this will require the Western left to accept responsibility for its historical weaknesses and acknowledge that there is no “right” or “wrong” socialism. Socialism is a universal project that unites all of humanity, and there is no “someone else’s” responsibility for a flawed socialism.

P.S. And just in case: before dismissing me as another tankie or Marxist Leninist, read “Revolution, actually: Mamdani’s Election Is a Class Victory in a Class War.” Because it’s not that simple, comrades, and when I’m saying that we need to do away with those false divisions, I mean it.

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