You shouldn’t extrapolate from Stalin’s regime to the whole Soviet era. Stalin is infamous for making the USSR backward in genetics, history, archaeology, and l

You shouldn’t extrapolate from Stalin’s regime to the whole Soviet era. Stalin is infamous for making the USSR backward in genetics, history, archaeology, and linguistics. Yet as soon as he died, those fields recovered and significant progress on even a global level was made. My own academic background is in the latter three subjects, and I cite work by Soviet scholars in any publication I write. Most academic libraries in the West keep Soviet academic publications from the Stalinist era in the closed stacks, because no one ever asks for them. There is a reason for that: the level of scholarship is poor, and the author feels compelled to praise the “Great Leader” (вождь) even if he was writing on something so removed from the modern Soviet Union and Communist ideology as e.g. 3rd-century CE grave finds. However, from the Khrushchev era on, Soviet scholarship in many fields was as strong as in the West and, as I said, some of those works are standard references for the field regardless of where on earth you live and work. I would consider the late Soviet Union a fairly “intellectual” culture, because even as in the West the attraction of many such academic careers declined in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e. the belief that such degrees were useless and there was no way to make a living from them), in the USSR it was still very respectable to enter such fields. Naturally, however, that was only possible under an overall planned economy that turned out to be deeply flawed and inhuman, and as I mentioned elsewhere here Russia’s intellectual culture declined after the fall of Communism, but still.