In this field communism made the same mistake of the postmodernists: it couldn't conceive of objective science without an agenda hidden somewhere. Genetics was labeled "bourgeois science" and thus not worth learning. A classic example of rejecting a good idea because of who happened to say it.
I'd say argue it's not a complete mistake, and indeed can be a very useful guide, to assume that there is an ideology behind everything, even science. There are, however, a number of mistakes one can make given this statement, the first being to divide all ideologies according to familiar political divisions (capitalist/communist) rather than imagine there might be local ideological divisions in any given field, across arbitrary dimensions. And the second being to think biased results are useless (a coin being biased doesn't make it an ineffective random number generator).
I find it useful to think in this way when reading papers (in physics) : it's entirely possible, even pretty certain, to miss very clear and simple ideas because the ideological background in which things are presented does not have room for them (the classic Kuhnian idea). In this way I see postmodernism (and a good part of continental philosophy) as a useful warning, albeit like most useful warnings it can be taken too far into paranoia.
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: