It wasn't a culture of secrecy and bootlicking though. These weren't pawns following flawed orders at gunpoint, these were knowledgeable engineers acting on their own volition. I am unequivocally putting 100% of the blame on the controllers who were well aware of how their reactor worked, who disregarded the test plan, who knowingly ignored countless warning signals going off as they repeatedly disabled more and more safety systems. Chernobyl was not the result of some arcane and unforeseen design flaw which surprised the operators, it took hours of manual labor to shut off the cooling lines and raise the control rods, putting the reactor into a state it was clearly never designed to be in. The controllers weren't under immense pressure to conduct this test, in fact the test was never approved, and was delayed because of its low priority. Anyone with two braincells to rub together should have said "hey all the people who were supposed to be doing this test aren't here, the reactor is acting so weird that we're struggling to even get the right starting conditions, the grid operator doesn't want us to run the test right now, we've tested this before and it didn't work, countless warnings are going off, this test was never approved to begin with, and there isn't actually any reason to do the test right now, let's postpone it."
It's easy to say "of well they never should have been able to do this in the first place" but what does that actually look like? Reactor controllers need to be able to control the reactor. There are many reasonable scenarios where any given valve or control rod would need to be manipulated, and a long list of scenarios where you don't want to limit the options of engineers to avert a disaster. Having trained engineers be free to access what they need to but putting warning indicators in place to alert them about potentially hazardous actions is the right option. You could shift authority to other people, but at some point you have to trust that whoever it is you have placed in control of this thing will make reasonable choices.
The secrecy and the bootlicking came after the reactor blew up. Yes, had the soviet government been transparent people could have been evacuated faster and workers trying to tame the reactor could have been better equipped. The number of casualties could have been reduced, but the disaster still would have happened.
Everything is ultimately rooted in deeper issues. But none of those deeper issues made this disaster inevitable. The world is full of secretive bootlickers who have never pulled 94% of a reactor's control rods out. Secretive bootlicking does not necessitate nor encourage control rod removal. At the very worst, secretive bootlicking might prevent someone who was already going to remove a bunch of control rods from reconsidering that decision, but something else had to cause that decision to be made in the first place. That's not to say that addressing these issues can't be beneficial, and many changes were indeed implemented after the disaster, but the fact remains that this disaster didn't have to occur.