Even those who desired to conform to the Marxist-Leninist dogma could run afoul of the government agents who monitored the print media, because the standards changed constantly and without warning, and such standards were not always made clear. In some cases, this ambiguity was deliberate, giving the government a method to persecute any academician arbitrarily, because a case could be made against anyone, no matter what she or he had, or had not, written. In other cases, this shifting and invisible sand of standards was the result of competition between various branches of the Soviet government and the result of opportunistic adjustment in the government’s understanding of Marxist-Leninist as applied in concrete situations.
Teachers and professors, then, lived in constant fear. On the one hand, they were expected to give lectures and publish writings. On the other hand, at any moment, with no warning, these writings and lectures could be investigated because they were suspected of promoting Marxist too weakly. These attacks were not limited to political content. A professor might write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and find himself being arrested, because the essay was perceived as not being Leninist enough in tone. A teacher might present to students about the change from paleolithic society to neolithic society, and find himself in jail because his teaching was alleged to depart from communist orthodoxy.
The system was rigged: the government could simply declare that a publication failed to be enthusiastic enough in its promotion of Marxism. No evidence was required, and if evidence was given, it was subjective allegations, and no counter-argument was permitted. The system could be exploited by competing colleagues who could accuse each other of not energetically proclaiming Marxist doctrine. The process could be manipulated to serve the purposes of personal grudges.
Seeking some measure of protection from these arbitrary allegations and investigations, some academics discovered that there were safe zones within academia: disciplines like mathematics and linguistics. Soviet Socialist authorities figured that these fields were so abstract that they would have no political relevance.
This general situation, and the specific instance of Vitaly Shevoroshkin, are explained by author Robert Wright:
Linguistics has long been a haven for Soviet intellectuals of a contrary sort. In the pre-Gorbachev era, when the study of history and economics and nearly everything else involving human beings was tailored to exacting Marxist specifications, the study of language was exempt. It had been deemed in 1950 to have no connection with ideology (and had been so deemed by no less an authority than Joseph Stalin, who considered himself something of an expert on language). So linguists were free to say whatever they wanted — about language, at least — without fear of rebuke. Naturally, the discipline attracted a number of people with a disdain for authority, and developed a culture that tended to reinforce this disdain. Maybe, then, it isn’t surprising that Vitaly Shevoroshkin, a linguist at the University of Michigan who immigrated to America from the Soviet Union in 1974, has spent much of the time since then waging a guerrilla war against the orthodoxies of Western thought.
An academic who escaped from the Soviet Union knew what serious persecution was: it could mean years in a labor camp. By contrast, if his linguistic hypotheses were unpopular in America, as a tenured faculty member, the worst it would mean was encountering some disdain from a few colleagues: a laughably minor consequence.
Shevoroshkin went on to champion some radical propositions in linguistics, encountering the skepticism of his colleagues. The skepticism didn’t bother him; they weren’t, after all, going to throw him into the Gulag. Decades later, some of Shevoroshkin’s views have gained general acceptance; others are still hotly debated. But making controversial statements about historical philology probably saved his life: had he made equally controversial statements about economics or political theory, he probably would have frozen to death in Siberia.
