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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

Related, there are stories of the USSR turning its own spy satellites on itself to estimate correct crop yields because of the culture of lying and exaggeration internally. Basically nobody at the top really knew what was going on, because everyone below them constantly lied to avoid getting in trouble.

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I am not sure about all this: they did have a very competent secret service after all.

So the director of the agrar kolchose might lie and so on, but why should the secret informants who are installed in that company, lie about it?

So I am pretty sure, the information was avaiable. It was probably a matter of not wanting to believe the information as that would mean, the glorious sovjet union was maybe not so glorious after all - and thinking that, would make you a traitor. So lets just continue to wave and smile.

This is pretty historically documented, and kind of something that still exists as a holdover in ex-Soviet countries. The lying became so pervasive that it was impossible to tell what the actual output of industry was

The spies lied too and, perhaps worse, the analysis back at the Center was motivated by politics and the usual careerism. The Mitrokhin archives provide an excellent look at how the played out in foreign intelligence, domestic spying was fairly similar.

When everyone lies the only thing spies can collect is lies.

The spies were only used for repression, not for productive endeavours

Presumably the sort of people who can task spy satellites are the secret service.

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