not quite what he's on about here, but this reminded me of the new Russian public intellectuals in exile who offer courses for money on extremely basic and old-fashioned topics to russophones.

Again, this reminds me of how necessarily it is to ignore good Cold War-era scholarship on the USSR - generational amnesia. Conclusion - I think Sokolov here underestimately how much plagiarism and inattention there is in hard sciences, tbh