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I think almost all new branches of 20th century Western-originating science suffered some degree of unhelpful ideological scrutiny at one point or another although most of these cases were not as damaging or as well-known as Lysenkoism.

The pure science itself perhaps had the capability to catch up and recover but the centrally planned, often military-dominated industrial system was profoundly awful at actually managing industry and innovating. Much of Soviet industry remained woefully behind its Western counterparts - in capacity, precision, quality assurance, material science, you name it. One can reasonably argue that a great deal of Soviet engineering design ingenuity in a number of fields was driven by the constraints of what they could realistically produce.




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