During Cold War, CIA Plucked Soviet Submarine from Ocean Floor Using Giant Claw
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
It's the video on board the Glomar Explorer of a burial at sea ceremony of Soviet sailors found in the half of the submarine they managed to bring to the surface. Supposedly this was Top Secret until a copy was given to Yeltsin in 1991 or so.
And how cool is the Soviet anthem?
The song was written by Jacques Morali, Henri Belolo and the group's lead singer Victor Willis. The melody is based on the State Anthem of the Soviet Union composed by Alexander Alexandrov, which was itself a reworking of Pachelbel's Canon.
For one to determine that soldiers are 'enemy soldiers' would there not have to be a state of declared war?
Ask Iran if they're at war with the US (maybe kinda sorta). Then ask them if the US is an enemy (definitely). The same would go for Iran and Israel. There's no confusion there, you can clearly have enemies without a declared war.
The instant prior to the declaration of war the other side wasn't an enemy? Logically it's not a sound concept.
Ask a Vietnam War veteran, or a Korean War veteran, if they fought any enemy soldiers at any point. War was not declared in those cases either.
And these are obviously not soldiers in the first place - they're sailors.
Tell that to the dead.
This is how search auto completed my query on the matter: were russia and us allies in ww2
That suggests people are still surprised to learn that and routinely search that question. Americans tend to believe that Russia has always been our enemy and remains so in the eyes of many Americans to this day.
Compare that to US/UK aka true allies.
An alliance in every sense - it just wasn't a permanent alliance. Allied even though few liked Stalin's regime. Yalta conference - to plan the peace - was the point of change that slid toward cold war.
Edit: accurate numbers. :)
The whole army and the workers of the most crucial factories had ate almost exclusively a lend-lease food from USA, also after food stock depletion in 1943 Soviet Union increased the demand of food over weaponry to ¼ of supplies' tonnage (that's how my grandmother had a first taste of chocolate at the age of 9). So don't talk like it was "just food", some (due to widely censored documents and history classes) of us still know how crucial this support was, along with trucks, air fuel and others.
Without it USSR would have probably lost - probably the whole war, certainly Moscow and St Petersburg. Maybe there could have been withdrawal to the Steppes - though the fightback always struck me as unlikely after such a retreat. The food aid, and the hundreds of thousands of trucks, entire divisions using GB, Canadian and US tanks, or squadrons of aircraft. First convoy only weeks after German invasion. Enough that Britain delayed some operations due to lower availability at home. Important enough to both sides, to keep Germany split on two fronts. Without it all it could have taken far longer, or been lost on the Western front too. Liberating Europe would have been that much harder, perhaps impossible.
Then it all went to crap at Yalta, though signs were there from the Anglo-Soviet treaty in 41 with Stalin's wish to stick to the Nazi Molotov-Ribbetropp pact's view of Europe, and its spheres of influence. Which is pretty much exactly what post-war Europe got.
For the UK and US, it was much cheaper sending tanks and jeeps and letting the USSR sacrifice the lives.
A Russian leader gave a speech where he clasped his hands together above his head, iirc. Americans interpreted it as a threatening gesture suggesting Russia "winning" against America or conquering us. It was interpreted like he was a boxer self congratulating following a win, raising his own hand up in triumph over the enemy.
It was kind of a scandal and only came out later that it was a cultural misunderstanding. It was intended to suggest hands clasped in friendship or reaching out to each other and bridging the distance.
My mother knows some Russian. It was the norm to study Russian in school in East Germany, where she happened to grow up. This interfered with her getting permission to marry my father, an American soldier, because it helped make her a suspicious character who was probably a spy.
Those people are shallow. It's one of the most beloved anthems globally. Go check the comments in renditions of the anthem in YouTube.
Nobody cares if it was connected to USSR or not, the same way people can admire Gagarin and not care about the USSR connection.
Not to mention that there are worse things to be connected to than USSR -- USSR had several stages, including a more open stage (with many social firsts) in the NEP era, and a more or less conventional and more open post-60s part, it wasn't just stalinism and suppression all the way.
"The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then."
And that's from 2014.
Source: Last year I spent 6 weeks travelling around Romania and Moldova
Your attempt to relativise what Soviets did is a spit in face of each one of the 65 million victims.
That's neither here nor there. Many countries who weren't communist at all are like that. And most of them are far worse.
>Your attempt to relativise what Soviets did is a spit in face of each one of the 65 million victims.
Well, the extravagant "65 million" number and summation of anybody that died during that era as a victim is a spit in the face of the billions who say it as their cause, overthrew colonialism in their countries, and died by the tens of millions fighting Nazis.
What I said about Romania is that it used to be heavily subsidized at the cost of their own people from other regions and other nations' people, so of course the people in these poor areas had it better than today and liked it more than when the subsidies are gone. That does not excuse anything in any case.
Fighting in the second world war also excuses nothing. My countrymen also fought there and actually didn't conspire to start the war, if we are to compare dicks. From my point of view, of course the Russians and other SSSR nations helped win the war and I'm thankful, but again - that excuses nothing.
Also, yeah, some people today don't value freedom and would like economic subsidies instead. I'm very sure that would change the minute they lost their freedom - that's proven historical experience, people usually want freedom more than to stay alive.
Well, to me being crucial to not living in a Nazi Europe today, counts for a lot and excuses a lot. And I differentiate between bad actors like Stalin and co and their crimes, and a huge state with domestic (at least at first) and large global popular support.
>Also, yeah, some people today don't value freedom and would like economic subsidies instead.
Or they don't consider slavery to market forces and corporations freedom, and would rather have actual freedom from need with economic subsidies (which even the modern world is considering as UBI).
And no, communism never had popular support anywhere, especially not in Central Europe, but not really even in Russia except for the two major cities. It's just that those who didn't agree had no way of disagreement (and it was same in my country and everywhere in the Eastern Bloc). Note that I live with a Russian national/citizen, these are her words.
In my country, they had to literally throw our pro-West (we were supposed to be a part of the Marshall plan, btw) prime minister out of the window and kill some more people to establish their rule - not cool. They had 31% (not universal) popular support because people had no idea about this and frankly no idea about what happened during the war as well, and that popular support was lost not even a year into their rule. This all happened AFTER the second world war.
> Well, to me being crucial to not living in a Nazi Europe today, counts for a lot and excuses a lot
Well, not to me. They could've went home after the war but instead (this is the key part) they decided to kill the people they helped save - not cool; and then they returned again in 1968 to occupy some more - not cool. My country could've been a free place with happy people instead of dead and sad people for past 70 years if it wasn't for them. Our economy would not be destroyed and our wages and pensions would be comparable to Austrian. I feel absolutely zero sympathy. None of the people who fought in second world war are alive anyways; most of those who occupied us in 1968 still are.
BTW were you paying attention during history classes? Have you forgotten that it was also the USSR who actually started the second world war because of their hunger for more power and global communism (God save us)?
> slavery to market forces and corporations freedom
Stop with this shit already. There was actual slavery in communist/socialist countries, can't you feel how wrong and unemphatic what you're saying is? It seems like you have absolutely no idea of the horrors that happened, or you're soulless. Our grandfathers died in uranium mines, and this uranium was then "given" (give or we destroy you, what a choice! What a nice people!) to the Soviets for free so they could subsidize other places (these are the places where they liked it). NOT COOL. (my country was left with absolutely no uranium and zero repayment, btw)
No one is a slave to any market force in the Czech Republic or in most other Eastern Bloc countries (the problem here lies in corruption which in turn lobbies for harder debt collection laws - entirely government fault!), go solve your USA shit elsewhere, it's not my problem that "the land of the free" can't handle its market when even formerly communist countries can (btw many of my countrymen and friends live in the USA and their experience is vastly different, they always return with pockets full of money - seems interesting; maybe there is a problem with you Americans if foreigners that barely speak English are more successful in your own country).
I wonder what was the motivation behind that, huh
Rather than desperately trying to rewrite history, why don't you take a stroll through Cuba or Venezuela, the current and latest communism victims? Ask those people how much they like it.
Now they're stuck with it, though - all versions had lyrics written by the same guy, Sergei Mikhalkov, who died in 2009.
There was a canadian opera singer who did anthems for hockey games. He would sing three notes then turn the mic to the crowd. That is how national anthems should be done.
There is also a great vid of a game where the american soloist had a mic fail. The canadian crowd finished the american anthem for her.
The song was made originally as Bolsheviks' Party anthem with completely different lyrics (and author of them).
Not sure why it’s necessary to make a slight against our times? Even Osama Bin Laden was given a proper burial at sea, and he wasn’t even a soldier, he was a damn criminal. We didn’t even use photos of his remains for propaganda.
I remember the first political news, perhaps, that I really remember mattering (and understanding that it mattered) was the fall of the Berlin wall. I mean, I was like nine, so I didn't fully understand why it mattered, but I understood that it did matter.
But, I've always been into history, and I read a lot about it later.
Whenever I read about the period I'm overcome with just how quickly humanity developed restraint.
If we had any war in the second half of the 20th century that was at all like either of the major wars in the first half of the 20th century, humanity would be no more. If we had leaders of major powers in the second half of the 20th century who were as brutal and stupid as the leaders of the first half of the 20th century, we would not exist.
In just a few years, we went from expending all of our power, pouring every last ounce of effort and ingenuity into killing the enemy to the firing of MacAurther.
It's amazing, and really life-afferming in a lot of ways. Whatever you think of human nature, the fact that when faced with the actual choice, our leaders hesitated is huge. They resisted. rationality won out, and we continue to exist in this increasingly unlikely world.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
It sounds like they knew exactly what was going on.
Tangent: My grandfather was part of a U.S. Navy operation during WWII that was responsible for verifying enemy submarine sinkings ... basically, sending someone down to pick up an artifact that would prove the sunken submarine was at a certain location. I don't know how they did it in the deeper parts of the ocean, though.
The Soviets and even Russia today kinda sucks at deep sea recovery, even to raise the Kursk they had to contract a Dutch company.
Russia never had much offshore oil, and while even for the US navy a sub sinking is likely a recovery operation rather than a rescue one the US navy seem have been much more concern with developing the operational capabilities to at least attempt a rescue.
The story of Mir submarines is an interesting example of cold war era business:
Perhaps they didn't have the means to recover it themselves, nor the desire (it would mean admitting to the accident and deaths of the soldiers)
Highly recommend if you’ve never heard before: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/confirm-nor-deny
1. it's practical impossibility to make unarmed nuclear warhead to explode spontaneously. The worst thing that can happen is conventional explosion that spreads the contents into the sea.
2. it's ancient fission bomb designs where water getting inside the warhead slows down neutrons and starts the chain reaction.
I'm 99.9 percent sure than no ICBM ever had the #2 types. Only bombers had them few decades. Even if there were, putting one into a sub would be the definition of insanity. One mistake and Murmansk is gone seems too risky even for Soviets.
https://www.amazon.com/Taking-K-129-Russian-Operation-Histor...
A bonus for me in this book was the coverage about how the CIA built the U-2 and the A-12 Oxcart in secret.
This book goes into a lot more detail: https://www.amazon.com/Project-Azorian-CIA-Raising-K-129/dp/...
The engineering behind the gimble required to hold the huge length of pipe required to reach the sub is quite something.
They still do that, no?
As Mitch Hedberg said, "I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too."
Both highly advanced, almost undetectable submarines, failed to detect each other. The odds of meeting like that in such a big ocean must be miniscule.
US - 14. Russia - 11. UK, France, China - 4 each.
Edit: oh wow! That makes so much sense why it has the retractable roof on it! Never knew that before.
Is it implausible that it was sunk by the Americans? It certainly would have helped them know where to look.
This was the 1970's. Today people eschew the idea of similar treatment of Western embassies in Cuba.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/world/americas/cuba-unite...
Theremin created the Buran eavesdropping system. A precursor to the modern laser microphone, it worked by using a low-power infrared beam from a distance to detect sound vibrations in glass windows.