I hate to be the "source please" guy, but I can't manage to craft a search query to corroborate your claim about factory workers vs academics in the USSR. Which

I hate to be the "source please" guy, but I can't manage to craft a search query to corroborate your claim about factory workers vs academics in the USSR. Which particular five year plan are you talking about? What kind of factory work versus what kind of researcher? Given what I know about political infighting in the modern American academy though, I'd bet that the smart ones went to the politburo where they got to be the "who" and not the "whom" and it was the midwits at best who stuck around in the academy waiting to get shipped to the gulags for publishing something Stalin disliked. In other words, realizing how the system actually works instead of naively believing how it's claimed to work is just another intelligence test.