Distributed thought policing can be just as effective in enforcing error as the centralized variety. In the west, there are many true things that one cannot say: who can say how much damage these prohibitions have done to our decision making?

As for the Soviets: their physics, chemistry, and mathematics education was very good. It was only in the softer academic fields like history, biology, and psychology that you saw widespread nonsense. These fields are the ones with direct political implications. Today, we struggle with these fields in much the same way for much the same reason: see the replication crisis in psychology.