in the Soviet days all FDRs were decoded after every flight so Big Brother was always watching you
I have never heard about it. Can you give us a source of this information? It is not easy to get data from soviet FDR (МАРС) and consequently analyse them. You need to disconect, dismount and open FDR, take the tape out, insert the tape to reading device (НДУ-8) to load and transfer data to special decoding device (Луч). It takes several hours. And then you can start to analyse flight data. You have only last 30 min of last flight. Hours of work and very little information for any Big Brother.