Since it's talking about discoveries (or, as Anton says, inventions), that already incorporates the concept of "first" or "credit for being the first", so you might be able to do it like this:

... many great scientific discoveries, made by Russian scientists, were attributed to foreigners instead ...

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Note added at 16 hrs (2010-01-02 14:31:49 GMT)
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P.S. Of course, "priority of discovery" is a term. I assumed Gary knew that, but was looking for a way to accommodate "many great scientific" without the result being horribly clunky. Since it's the case that even Webster's meaning #1 for "discovery" is "an act ... of gaining knowledge of or ascertaining the existence of something PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN ...", I do believe that in many contexts one could indeed omit "priority" as being redundant. Of course there are other contexts, including legal and some academic ones, where readers might get antsy about the failure to write "priority of discovery" (because of the phenomenon of "independent discovery", etc.). In that case, you'd have to do some acrobatics to make it sound good, maybe even repeat "discovery": "... in many cases of great scientific discoveries made by Russian scientists, priority of discovery was attributed to ..."