Actually, as far as I can tell, this wasn't true in Russia either. There used to be a joke that a meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences was like a meeting of the 12 Tribes of Israel. I suspect that what you have in the case of the story I sent is a Western writer ignorant of actual Soviet reality who is regurgitating Cold War propaganda he or she believes to be fact. You come across this a lot in the Western press. This is why I almost never read anything on the Soviet Union written by somebody who didn't live there. 99% of Western Sovietology is garbage.
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