This is exactly the feeling I get from all of my family's stories. There was an immense amount of inefficiency and outright fabrication (no pun intended) at eve

This is exactly the feeling I get from all of my family's stories. There was an immense amount of inefficiency and outright fabrication (no pun intended) at every level of management beginning with Stalin's five year plans that only got worse in the three decades after World War II. The momentum generated by the existential threat of a full invasion was heavily bolstered by the availability of natural resources and a cultural emphasis on universal education which resulted in a lot of cutting edge military technology and scientific progress but by the mid 1970s the machine was running on fumes. By the time my grandparents left the aerospace industry (early 80s) it was a shell of its former self. Other than pioneering some stellar science using old but beefy rocket technology, it was incapable of developing anything groundbreaking new, especially given the gap in computer science and semiconductors that the Iron Curtain created in the 70s and 80s. The Buran project is a notable exception, but it was too little too late.