By Robbin Laird
My friend and colleague Erik Hoffmann and I worked extensively on analyzing the efforts to change the Soviet system under the pressures of the technological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. This was when Brzezinski published his book on the technotronic age and described the challenges a Soviet autocratic system faced to try to modernize.
The Soviet leadership recognized the challenge in part and spoke of the need to modify their system to deal with the scientific and technological revolution. Erik and I wrote about this attempt as one of aspiring to create technocratic socialism. This was the Soviet leadership’s attempt to adapt their system through concepts like “developed socialism” and scientific management of society, putting science and technology to work for the renovation of their system.
Yet the system became less innovative over time because of the nepotism and repression of the bureaucracy of the decaying Soviet system.
The Farewell Affair, which unfolded in the early 1980s, provided dramatic confirmation of the Soviet Union’s systematic dependence on Western technological espionage rather than indigenous innovation. The operation centered on Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB officer codenamed “Farewell” by French intelligence, who provided the West with over 4,000 documents detailing the extensive Soviet program to acquire Western technology. These documents revealed that the KGB’s Directorate T had been operating a massive intelligence network specifically tasked with stealing scientific and technical secrets from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan across virtually every sector of advanced technology.
The revelations exposed the profound structural weaknesses in the Soviet innovation system that had developed since the more creative early decades.
Rather than fostering original research and development, Soviet military-industrial planners had become increasingly reliant on reverse-engineering stolen Western designs and acquiring embargoed technologies through elaborate procurement networks.
The Farewell documents showed that Soviet weapons systems, computer technology, and manufacturing processes were often direct copies or adaptations of Western counterparts, sometimes implemented years behind the original innovations.
This technological parasitism had become so institutionalized that when the CIA and other Western agencies used the intelligence to feed disinformation back through these channels including deliberately flawed software and specifications, it caused significant disruptions to Soviet military programs, demonstrating just how dependent Moscow had become on this illicit technological transfer rather than developing genuine innovative capacity.
This is a completely ignored contribution of the Mitterrand Administration to the Reagan Administration which at the outset was fixated on tossing France out of NATO because Mitterrand had put three communists in his government.
Ironically, Putin with his invasion of Ukraine is bringing back the Soviet empire more in terms of spirit than of territorial expansion. The brain drain he has created of Russian scientists and engineers due to the “special military operations” recalls the state of Soviet science in the 1970s and 1980s.
It recalls the warnings by Andrei Sakharov of the fate of Russia with the decline of its scientific dynamism. Andrei Sakharov occupied a unique position in 20th-century history, simultaneously one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated scientists and its most prominent dissident. As the brilliant physicist who developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov enjoyed unprecedented access to the inner workings of the Soviet scientific establishment.
Yet it was precisely this privileged position that allowed him to see, with devastating clarity, how the authoritarian system was strangling the very scientific enterprise it claimed to champion.
Sakharov’s most damning critique centered on the Soviet system’s subordination of scientific truth to ideological orthodoxy. He witnessed firsthand how political doctrine could override empirical evidence, most notoriously in the case of Lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko’s scientifically fraudulent theories about genetics gained official support because they appeared to align with Marxist principles about environmental determinism. Meanwhile, legitimate geneticists were persecuted, their research suppressed, and some even imprisoned or executed.
“Science cannot develop normally under conditions where scientific concepts and scientific theories are subject to the commands of an outside force,” Sakharov argued in his seminal 1968 essay “Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom.” This external control created an environment where scientists learned to self-censor, avoiding research directions that might conflict with party doctrine, regardless of their scientific merit.
Equally destructive, in Sakharov’s view, was the Soviet system’s isolation of Russian scientists from the global scientific community. The Iron Curtain wasn’t merely a political barrier. It was an intellectual one that prevented the free exchange of ideas essential to scientific progress. Soviet scientists were largely cut off from international conferences, collaborative research projects, and the rapid dissemination of new discoveries that characterizes modern science.
This isolation created a kind of scientific inbreeding, where Russian researchers developed in relative isolation from global trends and methodologies. Sakharov recognized that science is inherently international and collaborative; breakthroughs in one laboratory must be freely shared and verified by others worldwide. The Soviet system’s paranoid secrecy and control over information flows fundamentally violated this principle.
Perhaps most insidiously, Sakharov observed how the climate of fear and repression stifled the intellectual courage necessary for scientific breakthrough. Revolutionary scientific ideas often challenge established orthodoxies, a dangerous proposition in a system where challenging authority could lead to imprisonment or worse. Scientists learned to play it safe, pursuing incremental research rather than bold hypotheses that might attract unwanted attention.
The brain drain that resulted was catastrophic. Talented researchers either emigrated when possible, were reassigned to military projects away from basic research, or simply abandoned science altogether. Those who remained often focused their energies on navigating bureaucratic hierarchies rather than advancing human knowledge.
Sakharov also criticized the heavy bureaucratic apparatus that governed Soviet science. Research priorities were set by political appointees rather than scientific merit, funding decisions reflected ideological considerations, and career advancement often depended more on party loyalty than scientific achievement. This created perverse incentives that rewarded conformity over creativity and political reliability over intellectual brilliance.
Sakharov’s analysis remains relevant today, offering lessons about the fragile relationship between scientific progress and political freedom. His life demonstrated that authentic scientific achievement requires not just material resources and talented individuals, but the intellectual freedom to pursue truth wherever it leads even when that truth challenges those in power.
What Putin has done is to take Russia from a country which was engaged with modern Europe to one at war with modern Europe which now is benefiting from the scientists, engineers and technicians who have fled Russia to the West.
See the following as well:
Putin’s War: How Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Triggered a Scientific Exodus