Would Noam Chomsky have been purged in the Soviet Union?

 (My Answer on Quora)

Chomsky has made a significant accomplishment in linguistics and carries with that a great deal of clout however the only reason that he has a voice politically in the US, is that he rightfully enjoys First Amendment protection and the various other trappings associated with a liberal democracy. He is privileged by Freedom that would be denied to him in a totalitarian society

It is from such a bedrock that Chomsky can sit aloft and pontificate about the strategic and moral failings of the United States. Even anti-capitalists can enjoy the benefit of constitutional speech protection and a free enterprise system. All the more so if you can compartmentalize.The US has served Chomsky well although you would never think so based on his writings.

Source: CAMERA UK

However if an alternative Chomsky had taken a similar path in the Stalinist Soviet Union, or indeed the period in the USSR leading up to the mid 80s, it is likely that the regime would have found some way of silencing him for good.

While Chomsky is a Far Leftist fellow traveler his brand of Libertarian Socialism (derived from Emma Goldman) would have fallen foul of the notion of Soviet doctrinal purity and even if he had been given a pass his odds of scaling the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ paranoia of the 1930–1950 period seem remote.

A politically vocal Chomsky - if he is indeed true to himself - would have landed up on the wrong side of Lavrentiy Beria’s henchmen at Lubyanka. The smart money would be on the Georgian psychopath. Many of the revolutionaries of 1917, with far greater historical pedigree than Chomsky failed to make it through the meat grinder. The sage from MIT would not fare better.

Still he has obvious smarts and if he prioritized surviving, the wise choice would be to keep his mouth shut and focus on his linguistics. But even so this would force him to tread carefully. An off color comment was sometimes all that it took to be carted off to hell.

Ronald Reagan labelled the Soviet Union the Evil Empire for good reason. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn detailed its human rights abuses and its diabolical gulag system. Both were spot on. The internal death tolls associated with the Soviet Union speak for themselves. Chomsky would have to either adapt or suffer an inglorious fate. He may have taken a third path which was to shill for the regime and so benefit personally. Many an intellectual has succumbed to the siren’s lure with immediate payments that followed.

The luxury of lecturing from above, as to what the political structure ought to be, to crowds of fawning undergraduates would not be tolerated in the USSR. This was not a regime that valued dissent. Too much was at stake and underneath the thin cloak the Emperor was bare.

For the alternative Noam Chomsky his life trajectory would have taken a vastly different path almost certainly veering toward the negative. This is to be expected. Other than both having their fair share of Marxists the Soviet Union was not Cambridge, Massachusetts. It had no problem eating its own.