A Soviet vision of the future: the legacy and influence of Tekhikia–Molodezhi

You hardly may found something about Соборность in Soviet tech journals, more likely -- synergy, emergence and stuff like this :)

I mean yes, technology was "stolen" all the time - from BOTH sides. F-117 stealth technology is based on research done in USSR. In 80ties, the US people happily took a ride in the first MiG-29s delivered to us in the 1980s and "stole" technology from there.

And yet, we don't go running around claiming that all USA flight technology achievements are based on CIA agents stealing tech and thus diminishing everything people Lockheed etc. did.

If you actually look at declassified primary sources you'll see that a huge amount of effort went into eastern designs as well and the impact of "stolen" technology is actually rather limited due to the differences in approaches of R&D teams.

Synthetic diamonds?

That's two off the top of my head.

Everyone's smartphone listens to radio beeps to geolocate.

>'Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Russian scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. [..] However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world.[16][17] A summary of these publications was published in English in 2009 in "A Literature Review of the Practical Application of Bacteriophage Research"'

2. Electronics: Léon Theremin work in the Soviet Union which is the basis of RFID technologies [1] [2].

3. History: Knorozov work deciphering the Mayan glyphs. He work put modern Mayan studies on a firm foundation. [3]

4. Physics: Much of the developments in dynamical systems came from "the Moscow School":

>"A more abstract approach, developed in Moscow, gained attention outside the U.S.S.R. via the translation of (Nemytskii and Stepanov, 1960), introduced by S. Lefschetz, who had himself published a text on qualitative theory a few years earlier (Lefschetz 1957). Here the first clearly-defined strange attractor – the solenoid – was described. The works of Kolmogorov, Anosov, Arnold and Sinai grew out of this "Moscow school" in the 1950-60's, with important work on ergodic theory (Sinai, 1966), geodesic flows (Anosov, 1967) and billiards (Sinai, 1970), using Kolmogorov's idea of K-systems. Some of this was motivated by S. Smale's visit to Moscow in 1961, during which he met Anosov, Arnold and Sinai and told them of the conjecture that structurally stable systems with infinitely many periodic orbits could exist (see Smale's Horseshoe, below)." [4]

5. Computer Science/Complexity Theory: "The concept of NP-completeness was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s in parallel by researchers in the US and the USSR."

The list is very long and I don't have all day so I'm stopping here but people living in the Soviet Union made many important scientific achievements. This is not an endorsement of the Soviet Union (see Theremin's poor treatment).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Theremin#Return_to_t...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov#Key_research

[4]: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/History_of_dynamical_sys...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook%E2%80%93Levin_theorem#Con...

There are a few good books on what Korolevs teams did which are pretty fascinating in hindsight, especially due to limited access to computers in USSR. (Obviously sources about the US space programs are about 100x more numerous in the western world :) )

The soviets did start by copying the V2, but immediately after that switched to original designs.

HN seems to be really out of depth for you.

Russians did get a huge boost in rocket tech from von Braun's works. However it was a long way to orbital carriers. After R-1 - a copy of V-2 - USSR made R-2 with better engines (more concentrated ethanol), separatable warhead and load-bearing tanks, then R-5 with even better engines and range, then switched to kerosene engines, practically building technology from scratch (engines, for example, used structure brazen to copper-based heat wall with milled cooling channels), multiple stages (did you see how R-7 does staging? It's a ballet in air), "tulpan" launch system, producing base for still flying Semyorka.

George Sutton, author of "History of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines" mentiones that USSR spend quite a bit more perfecting engine technology than other countries. That's part of the reason why 26 years after dissolution of USSR the technology created there is practically used with modifications on modern successful launchers (including in USA).

In general, if you have a country with big population, economic and schools producing some Nobel prize-level scientists it's hard to defend the idea that nothing of value can be made there. That doesn't diminish USSR big shortcomings but the credit is certainly due where it is.

Regarding Operation Paperclip - did you read Chertok's memoirs, where he describes his part of the story (he participated in the hunting for specialists in Germany during 1945)?

When Project Apollo uses Yu. Kondratyuk's (A. Shargey) staging calculations of course that's not a copying of a critical part.