Soviet administration is kind of hard to wrap my head around. You'd think that (1) no financial incentives (ideally) and (2) accountability based on 'see you in the Gulag' if something goes wrong, would lead to people being more transparent about risks - but it seems the opposite happened!

Is it because those who have to bear the risks (e.g. RBMK on-site engineers) aren't the same who'd pass on information through the administrative chain? Was the main thing missing free information flow? Could communism work if all economic/infrastructure/administration units would just be forced to publish all their data in raw form, so other people could analyse it and make better decisions?