> did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs?
Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find:
- Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently)
- Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962
- Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression
- Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance
All this despite a few decades of suppression of computing science as an un-Marxist "bourgeois pseudoscience".
There were plenty of passionate and talented Soviet researchers - although it also helped to work in a discipline that was promoted, as opposed to repressed by the state.
Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find:
- Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently)
- Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962
- Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression
- Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance