The USSR had control over everything back in the day, though the hard sciences and their people had great latitude and somehow enjoyed more freedom compared to those in other domains. They were like little precious princesses.
That's because hard sciences are, well, too hard for your average Soviet dictator to understand, control, and screw up. Not hard enough, apparently, for the average Western politician in 2015.
> The USSR had control over everything back in the day, though the hard sciences and their people had great latitude and somehow enjoyed more freedom compared to those in other domains.
This was born out of necessity: the hard sciences were the weapons program, first and foremost. Then, there's usually not much to argue in material world from Communist POV. Unlike the soft/social sciences where there's much bigger potential for subversive.
That said, they never had more "latitude" than their Western colleagues. There were waves of crackdowns on supporters of relativist physics, on computer science, on genetics. Korolev, the champion behind the Soviet space programme, died from kidney condition resulting from his prison camp labor.
The USSR had control over everything back in the day, though the hard sciences and their people had great latitude and somehow enjoyed more freedom compared to those in other domains. They were like little precious princesses.
That's because hard sciences are, well, too hard for your average Soviet dictator to understand, control, and screw up. Not hard enough, apparently, for the average Western politician in 2015.