" Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest. "

― Adam Higginbotham , Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster