> Have a generation of engineers who weren't held back by white haired out of touch fossils. What a bizarre defense of the purges and show trials... And well

> Have a generation of engineers who weren't held back by white haired out of touch fossils. What a bizarre defense of the purges and show trials... And well anyway, that's not what they did. They placed party officials and "friendly" workers in charge of scientists and engineers and shipped them off to camps if they expressed ideas unfriendly to the party. For a good decade everyone researching plant genetics stopped doing science or ended up in prison[1]. For years they didn't innovate really at all. In the early days they leaned on foreign specialists[2]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialization_in_the_Soviet_Union#Use_of_foreign_specialists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialization_in_the_Sovie...