As somebody who grew up as a person and as a programmer in 80s, the problem wasn't purity of the math or the chemicals. The problem was an extremely crappy level of manufacturing quality in everything and lacking facilities in quantity of available technology. I was lucky to grow up in a big city, have educated parents and study in one of the best schools in the country. So I had access to a variety of hardware and software and technology (domestic and imported). Most people however barely had access to programmable calculators, and the only way to actually get access to a PC-level computer would be either work in one of the places where it deemed necessary or build one by yourself (not that the parts would be easily accessible too, you may have to go to a special marketplace, etc.).

Same thing was with information materials - Soviet ones were badly made, severely outdated and rarely available without some kind of special access (you had to know people). I had to translate things from foreign materials (yes, I was lucky to know the right people to gain access to some foreign computer journals), bring books from other neighboring countries (e.g. Bulgaria), etc. As I said, I was lucky - most of my age peers were at best told what the computer is and how one would program it on a whiteboard, if at all.

So yes, by the 80s the Lysenkoist wars were in the past, and actually computers were thought as a way to solve the inadequacies of socialist planning (by then amply evident to all smart people, who were furiously searching for ways to prop up the collapsing system). But general weaknesses of economy, scientific culture, engineering culture, consumer goods manufacturing and in general overall decay of nearly everything (that very soon led to the collapse of the system) ensured that Soviet computer industry was constantly way behind and reduced to badly copying old Western samples, both in the high and consumer ends. It wasn't some one "panic" event that set the Soviets back - it was the inevitable consequence of the overall societal model, and could not have been avoided.

That said, once the USSR collapsed and people could access the world's technology and information freely, people from ex-Soviet countries caught up pretty quickly on the software, indeed - there are a lot of excellent programmers there, though many of them are "from there" already.