The magazines were great, though. The entire generation of engineers were inspired by them. I remember getting the entire cardboard box of issues once — what a happy day!
That's kinda really insulting to a lot of excellent engineers and scientist that worked on technology in USSR.
Isn't Cold War far enough behind that we can slowly stop with the western propaganda and deliberate attempts to downplay all eastern achievements?
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.
Enjoy this chapter from a book on the subject of GRU: http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov8/04.html
For example for your Manhattan project thing is the classic example of how misleading such simplified outlook on the world can be. GRU stole the information about US atomic bomb, but then the info wasn't really used (because it wasn't trusted) and the USSR bombs ended up being developed independently. See this post for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21zc0v/how_d...
This is actually a rather common occurence - even in things like USSR copying the US bomber design it showed that the technology and approaches to it were suffciently different that stolen plans weren't really that useful for plain copying. They did provide invaluable direction for R&D of course.
Let me be clear - I'm not even remotely claiming that USSR didn't attempt to copy technology or attempt to benefit it. I'm just a bit annoyed at the amount of Americans that reflexively try to erase contributions and hard work of a lot of USSR's engineers and scientists with this naive and simple dismissal. I understand that it's driven by what's effectively 50 years of propagands (from both sides!), but in 2017 we should do better. We have declassified sources now.
That's like saying that all Soviet technology is based on research done in UK and France. You know: Newton, Lavoisier, Pascal, Boyle, Joule...
> happily took a ride in the first MiG-29s delivered to us in the 1980s and "stole" technology from there
Take a ride == stole technology?
Are you serious?
In fact, not reinventing the wheel allowed for the great scientific and engineering achievements that the Soviet Union did have.
Must be due to GRU spying. /s
Look at glorious Soviet cars, for example.
Now look at glorious Soviet massframe computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project
Richard Rhodes is probably the definitive source for this history in The Making Of The Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun. Both excellent reads.
I don't say this to discount the abilities of the Soviet scientists working on the problem; it's an incredible achievement even with the extra "stolen" knowledge. But keep in mind that the US pursued four totally separate technologies for uranium separation and built massively expensive plants for each because they didn't know which was going to work out. The Soviets benefitted by avoiding a lot of very expensive and time-consuming dead ends.
Name me THREE scientific achievements "made in USSR" which ordinary people still use in their daily lives.
No, AK machine gun will not do. And sputnik is no go as well - nobody listens to radio beeps nowadays.
Can you? Just three of them? Surely, 70 years of scientific achievements will do wonders, right?
Synthetic diamonds?
That's two off the top of my head.
Synthetic diamonds were created by French chemist in 19th century.
What are you trying to prove? That inventions aren't done in vacuum and everybody stands on the shoulders of giants coming before him? Or you literally believe that USA had a half century Cold War with opponent who can't invent a thing?
Russians? Not Chinese or British or Americans, but Russians?
I'm amazed on number of Russian myths here.
Everyone's smartphone listens to radio beeps to geolocate.
Are you telling me that Soviets invented GPS?
You already know about the technology to launch those precise clocks to orbit.
That's... amazing.
"It was October 4th, 1957. Scientists at MIT noticed that the frequency of the radio signals transmitted by the small Russian satellite increased as it approached and decreased as it moved away. This was caused by the Doppler Effect, the same thing that makes the timbre of a car horn change as the car rushes by.
This gave the scientists a grand idea. Satellites could be tracked from the ground by measuring the frequency of the radio signals they emitted, and conversely, the locations of receivers on the ground could be tracked by their distance from the satellites. That, in a nutshell, is the conceptual foundation of modern GPS."
2. Vladimir Zworykin was a Soviet scientist? Really?
3. First soviet nuclear power plant was highly classified. First commercial nuclear power plant was created in US.
4. Artificial heart - for a dog. Not for a human.
5. And as for microwave oven in 1941 - is this another Russian myth?
Are you aware that Obninsk was a "closed" city and wasn't marked on the Soviet maps initially?
So whole town was classified, among the power plant.
It's actually quite interesting that the Soviets had an earlier one - I guess the page should be updated?
So, yes, basically - commercial achievements for ordinary people.
I'd like to see sources to lasers, microwave ovens and TVs which were invented by Soviets.
Lasers, TVs: check my previous answer.
If you want to know more about scientific success in USSR, please find yourself a course on history and philosophy of science / informatics. Soviet scientists did a lot contributions to the scientific community, including in such areas like chemistry, cybernetics, neurophysiology, psychology among others, just like any other big country in the world.
I was particularly interested in the history of sound synthesis in the 1930s, which I personally find fascinating (Evgeny Scholpo, Arseny Avraamov, Boris Yankovsky). They basically implemented spectral resynthesis and wavetable techniques using light and film! The sad thing is that this history has been stocking in archives until someone accidentally found them.
Those excerpts miraculously appeared only in 2013, when another wave of Russian nationalism sweeped over.
Consider me suspicious.
> Soviet scientists did a lot contributions to the scientific community, including in such areas like chemistry, cybernetics, neurophysiology, psychology among others, just like any other big country in the world.
No. Other big countries made _actual_ inventions (US, UK, France, Germany).
I'd better consider you a russophobic. Quite typical for eastern Europe, and ex-USSR countries.
> when another wave of Russian nationalism sweeped over
There is no Russian nationalism. You see is the distorted and fragmented reality, projected onto you from your media (I'm wandering what). The problem is that you don't really understand what are you talking about and what is the purpose of your discussion. Your messages are not connected with a single subject, you use slongans, populisms, trumpisms, but no substance. I've seen this in 2014–2015 when the Russian media were brainwashing people at insane rates.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise not to abuse the site like this in the future.
Regarding your questions. 1) Three scientists received a Nobel prize for their work on lasers, you can check the wiki for names. 2) About the TV: my bad, A. Zworykin has been working in the US on the TV problem --- it's hard to trace everyone who emigrated due to the Soviet massacre. Anyway, you can find experiments, etc. for example, by Leo Theremin.
In Soviet Russia question marks aren't marking questions!
Are you implying that removing cornea and re-attaching it will be _cheaper_ than grinding prescription glasses?
>'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...
Not sure that many people are using deciphered Mayan glyphs in their daily routines.
This gets to a question about the value of history. I find history exceptionally valuable to society, but you may disagree.
>This is good, but I've asked about achievements "made in USSR" which ordinary people still use in their daily lives.
Lets ignore Bacteriophages while we are at it. Yes, they improved countless peoples health and yes this research is used in biology, but US biotechs have met difficulty commercializing this treatment in the US because while it saves lives it is hard to monetize (IP issues). But hey, if you get a MR bacterial infection you might be happy that other options exist. [0]
That leaves three things people continue to use in their daily lives:
1. RFIDs,
2. Complexity Theory (you are using it right now),
3. and Dynamical Systems advances (as seen in aircraft, boats, cars, medical devices, electronics, etc...).
So no need for any time machines :)
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.