You say that information sharing was virtually non existent between higher and lower ranks when it came to the military ! ? Good job you are wrong. The USSR had Nuclear capability from the time of Stalin. There had to be communication at all levels. Same for the other Nuclear capable Nations, and still is.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Sharing information pretty much defeats the purpose of making something secret. All military or intelligence information was classified in the USSR and unauthorized sharing was punishable (art.75 of Criminal of the RSFSR, version 1960). That is exactly why local "authorities" such as investigators or prosecutors were never aware of any Military or KGB activity. Do you think that if there is a new weapon test (maybe an illegal one, chemical? spiked with uranium?), the Air force officers along with KGB men would first travel around Soviet Russia to brief all the low-ranked comrades? Sounds silly, doesn't it?
"Pre-digital technology helped, including Soviet policies that
monopolized the early digital technologies and kept them well away from
anyone who was not completely reliable. But technology was not
everything. The hermetic, suffocating character of Soviet secrecy can
hardly be explained without mentioning another constituent that was not
so much institutional as moral or ethical. Soviet leaders were entirely
unaffected by any sense of obligation to account in public for the
decisions they made or their outcomes. On the contrary, the greatest
obligation that they felt was to each other, expressed in a code of silence
that they called “conspirativeness.”
The concept of conspirativeness was unknown to Hutchings (1987),
and it was a surprise to Fitzpatrick (1990). But the code was as old as the
Bolshevik Revolution. It had its origins in the pre-revolutionary
underground. When the Bolsheviks came to power, conspirativeness
became an organizing principle of the new Soviet state, being formalized
in the 1920s, at the beginning of Stalin’s tenure as party general secretary
4
(Kurenkov 2015; also Istochnik 1993; Khlevniuk et al. 1995: 74-77; on
“conspirativity” in the Romanian Securitate, see Verdery 2014: 43-50).
Under conspirativeness, no one had a right to know anything at all.
There was only need-to-know, granted by higher to lower authority and
only ever on a discretionary and temporary basis. Table 1 contrasts the
basic codes of Soviet and American government secrecy since World War
II. As the table suggests, right-to-know versus need-to-know was a
defining conflict of the Cold War (cf Hutchings 1987: 224-226). " p.3-4
"The capacity of the Soviet state to prevent abuse of office was limited
by the fact that the most important stage of initial investigation was itself
secret. This was the stage of party investigation, which provided the first
filter in the processing of cases of wrong doing. Party investigation was a
party secret, not a state secret, but the concept of conspirativeness that
applied was identical. " p.14
source:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2017/twerp_1134_harrison.pdf