In the Soviet Union, people were quite skilled at reading between the lines. They had to, because otherwise it was impossible to know what was going on. The efforts to cover this up mean that there are solid reasons to suspect the story is true.

You can bet things are going to get even crazier with better tech to falsify evidence. This is one reason why blockchains are so important. They are harder to scrub clean if need be, which means that at the very least there will be a permanent record of all information, false or not.