Glad that era is over and that these days academics is held up as a bastion of political neutrality and free speech!
Realistically the struggle between liberal ideals and more instinctual authoritarian leanings is an ongoing process that turns up in every country. The issue is that Russia looks like what happens when the authoritarians just get too much power. The thing that is baffling is that despite the effectively inevitable outcome that more liberalism leads to better outcome there is no talking people down from taking authoritarian stances on nearly every policy area.
Two differences were, no one was killed without a fair trial (the Rosenbergs of that time were definitely guilty and they went through a normal court system) , and, the Venona decrypts showed that there were a lot of spies just as McCarthy said.
Just through a random wikipedia list, I found Oppenheimer (if not an outright member of the communist party, very closely aligned) and Needham (who had agreed to be an Inspector in North Korea).
