It may not have been a hoax, but it looks like the brothers Bogdanov did manage to publish nonsense papers on theoretical physics in peer-reviewed journals. For a thorough look into the affair, read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

There are a number of failures that have come to light. First is the process by which Ph.D.'s are granted at the University of Bourgogne. The review committee, by its own belated admission, did not contain anybody who truly understood what the Ph.D. theses were about. At the time Igor's thesis was in serious trouble and was given a way out: publish three or four papers in peer-reviewed journals and he would be given his Ph.D. This is a horrible cop-out, and it set up the circumstances under which Igor at least had a big incentive to get papers published quickly. That he managed to get these papers published with his brother points to the second big failure, that of the peer-review process. Again the papers were reviewed by scientists who did not really have the background to assess the validity. This has left a lot of egg on faces.

The article makes the point that theoretical physics has become so esoteric and removed from reality, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to establish the vital link between theoretical predictions and actual experiment to falsify the theory. Once you break that link between theory and experiment, you move out of the realm of science and into the world of blather.

Physicists did expose the nonsense in these papers, so in that sense the scientific process still works. But that's not the point. The peer-review process should have prevented these papers from ever being published.