More questions along a similar line:
Are there any other currently/recently-existing scientific communities?
Is there anything the Soviets got right that we don't know about yet? There was a SSC comment thread a while back about the Soviet belief in magnetic storms influencing behavior, which is something the Americans are apparently only now looking into.
Viliam_Bur says: "In Soviet Union many scientists knew that e.g. Lysenkoism was a fraud, they were just afraid to speak openly, because they would be fired or put in prison." What beliefs in America/the West are like Lysenkoism? What can be done about them?
How accepted was Lysenkoism among the general public? scientists outside the relevant field? the political elite?
There are many other examples of beliefs like the Soviet one in abiogenic oil: Germans and low blood pressure, Japanese and blood types, Koreans and fan death, 19th-century Americans and the belief that masturbation causes insanity, Anglophones (or at least Americans and Brits) and the belief that eating carrots improves eyesight. What beliefs in [parts of] America/the West fall into that category? What, if any, are their significant consequences? (Abiogenic oil means depletion isn't a problem; fan death means... people buy fewer fans, and don't leave them on at night.)
None of the examples you mention is exactly official doctrine.
What can we learn about science from the divide during the Cold War?
I have one example in mind: America held that coal and oil were fossil fuels, the stored energy of the sun, while the Soviets held that they were the result of geologic forces applied to primordial methane.
At least one side is thoroughly wrong. This isn't a politically charged topic like sociology, or even biology, but a physical science where people are supposed to agree on the answers. This isn't a matter of research priorities, where one side doesn't care enough to figure things out, but a topic that both sides saw to be of great importance, and where they both claimed to apply their theories. On the other hand, Lysenkoism seems to have resulted from the practical importance of crop breeding.
First of all, this example supports the claim that there really was a divide, that science was disconnected into two poorly communicating camps. It suggests that when the two sides reached the same results on other topics, they did so independently. Even if we cannot learn from this example, it suggests that we may be able to learn from other consequences of dividing the scientific community.
My understanding is that although some Russian language research papers were available in America, they were completely ignored and the scientists failed to even acknowledge that there was a community with divergent opinions. I don't know about the other direction.
Some questions: