Were Soviet physicists able to produce research that rivaled the West?

I often find myself in arguments with relatives who tell me that the Soviet Union was a textbook example of all failings, both moral and intellectual. They often lecture me that the Soviets declared Lamarckian evolution to be fact based on nothing but Soviet dogma, and that’s just how all Soviet science worked. The Central bureau declared the truth, and then Soviet scientists had to implement it into reality.

My relatives tell me that as a result, Soviet science was always decades behind American science. PhDs in the Soviet Union would have barely been able to pass first year graduate courses in the US. 99% of all Soviet rockets exploded on the launch pad. Chernobyl happened.

I asked, how did they manage to launch Sputnik? And my relatives say, you launch 1,000 rockets and one manages to make it. That’s not impressive. The Soviets were bound to get lucky, and they had a complete disregard for all safety. Human life was cheap and expendable. And of course, most science that actually worked was stolen from America via spies.

I want to know, is there any truth to this? Was Soviet physics hopelessly backwards? Were Soviet rockets primitive, dangerous, and unreliable because Soviet physicists and engineers did not really understand how physics works?