My understanding of "strong political pressure" for the years of Kolmogorov in the USSR meant that ended up in a salt mine in Siberia and dead in a year or so. But apparently somehow Kolmogorov was smart enough to avoid that end.

Yup, suspicions confirmed, all around the world, no matter what, bureaucracies have a lot in common: If have something good and want to kill it off, then set up a bureaucracy to help it!!!!! That's partly a black joke; likely the US NSF and NIH and lots of private efforts in math, physical science, medical science do terrifically good things. And, no joke that the LHC is a big bureaucracy and found the Higgs Boson, a darned good thing.

Still there can be some truth to the joke. E.g., in the US I've seen some of what you said about publish or perish: While I never really wanted such an academic research career (I just wanted a JOB and to support a family and looked at my math Ph.D. as vocational education), eventually it dawned on me that actually in some fields the publication standards sufficient for publish or perish are low and that a good researcher should be able to toss out dozens of such papers, if only as side efforts, while otherwise doing the important stuff.

Bluntly when I was considering academic math research, the main obstacle, and it was SEVERE, was that I didn't quite yet have access to a computer that could run Knuth's TeX math word processing software. Bluntly the word processing for typing in the math research was MUCH more challenging than doing the math research!

There's another relevant rule: In social, political, bureaucratic, etc. systems, when want to do better, measure it, and, for that, create, design, implement, and setup measures.

Then the system responds, does well on the measures, just the measures -- games, hacks, manipulates, tricks, fools, takes advantage of weaknesses in the measures -- with harm to what was being measured! Partly another black joke but, still, with some sad truth.

With bad measures, the Soviets were not the only ones with the problem of "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.".

Then we get reminded that democracy and free enterprise are the worst systems ever invented except for all the other systems that have ever been tried. Another black joke; sometimes democracy and free enterprise do really well. E.g., in a democracy, we can elect liars, crooks, incompetents, etc. but eventually the disaster becomes obvious to enough voters, and then we get some better candidates and an ELECTION to throw the rascals out -- been known to happen, sometimes slowly, but, still, happens.

I know next to nothing about the Soviet system, but from what little I know it looks like it was an astounding juxtaposition of just horrible suffering and lost opportunities, waste, e.g., on military efforts, lots of just horrible inefficiencies, yet at times some, maybe not enough, maybe with the movie remark "But do you know what it cost?", astoundingly good things -- Kolmogorov, Oistrakh in violin, Giles in piano, Garanca in voice (grew up in one of the Baltic states when they were part of the USSR), the Mariinsky Ballet, etc.

I'm trying to get my startup live on the Internet; there are some ways it could help civilization. Otherwise I can't solve all the problems. But democracy and free enterprise when they work well -- in the US from 1929 to 1942 they didn't work so well -- can be amazingly good things.