I can understand not liking Lenin, but Chomsky's claim that he was just an opportunist who wrote State and Revolution to capitalize on the popularity of libertarian socialism is absolutely absurd and baseless. Nothing in Lenin's writings, published or private, suggest that.

Lenin was inspired to write State and Revolution by Bukharin's clarification that Marx was not a statist, and Lenin wanted to further popularize this fact. The only reason I can think of why Chomsky would claim this is to try to distance Lenin from the socialist tradition.

It's true that Lenin moved away from his original position past the 20s, but a more reasonable explanation is his position as the representative of a ruling party in a country where the establishment of socialism seemed increasingly less likely due to the difficult conditions.