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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

It's mentioned in the Zenit-E review[0]:

"Most Soviet camera designs were perfectly sound – it was more often that the construction itself was lacking. TOE engineers learned on the assembly line, then went back to the UK and stripped and reassembled every single camera that came into the UK."

I grew up in Poland and my dad said the exact same thing - that when he was young, if you managed to somehow buy yourself a brand new Soviet motocrycle, fresh from the factory, the very first thing you did was disassemble the whole thing to bits, lubricate, and reassemble everything at correct torques and in correct places. Then you could go and safely use it.

[0]https://kosmofoto.com/2018/12/zenit-e-russian-camera-review/

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This, used to do this with everything back in the day.

Cameras, bicycles, furniture, you name it. The thing would right out not work or just fall apart in a few days because loose screws.

20 Y later I still have the urge to take brand new things apart just to check if everything is a-ok.

If you buy a high end wood plane today, it's still recommended you disassemble the whole thing, lap the faces and then reassemble.

They do a good job, but you can achieve better tolerances using equipment that costs less than the first plane (and which you might be able to borrow)

Designs were sound since they were stolen by KGB from the West.

I mean..........urgh. It's an unbelivably convoluted topic and I feel like just dismissing it as "stolen by KGB from the West" is simply unfair.

Yes, a lot of designs were simply copied from western equivalents. But also a lot of designs weren't, or were actually improvements over western designs in some crucial ways(washing machines being overbuilt because repairs were unlikely, so certain components were upgraded to last longer). Soviets(and the rest of the Eastern block) had plenty of brilliant, incredibly skilled and competent engineers and designers and thinkers, and they all did the best with what they had access to. It's a topic worthy of tomes of literature.

There was no need for KGB to steal everything, as they already had good optics; the Zeiss factories were moved to Russian-controlled teritories during the Second World War[1], including workers.

[1] http://www.novacon.com.br/lenses08.htm

A lot more designs than were stolen by the west from the west or non-existant designs stolen from the east by the west.

The parent comentator has a valid point, the East usually copied good designs from the West.

Which they could improve.

I had a teacher in the early '90s that said the Japanese were the best at reinventing things. They would take something, study it, and remake them better.

I mean..........urgh. It's an unbelivably convoluted topic and I feel like just dismissing it as "stolen by KGB from the West" is simply unfair.

Yep. The article even mentions that initial designs for some of these cameras were taken as war reparations in the aftermath of WWII. I suppose Leica might see that as theft, but it was hardly KGB espionage.

And one of the funny things I've noticed over the years is that often, the technology that was stolen (or sometimes legitimately transferred) from the west often more-or-less failed, or was superseded, in western markets. In the railway sphere, Alco and Fairbanks-Morse diesel engine designs dominated, long after they disappeared from American rails. Turning to home computers, many 1980s Soviet home computers were PDP-11 clones. Modern Ural motorcycles are a result of technology transfer from BMW dating to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

I have a Soviet fountain pen along the same model as the Parker 21/51. I've had three 21s develop a crack in the same place as the cheap plastic becomes very brittle with age, but no such issue with its Soviet twin. The Soviet one also uses a more old-fashioned button filler mechanism that holds more ink than the Parker's aerometric bladder. I used it a lot for note-taking in school.

Ural motorcycles are really the opposite, though- an example of the transfer of a technology that was very successful in the West. Yes, BMW iterated on the R71 and the R75 was more advanced than the M-72, but that technology didn't fail and neither was it superseded (at least not more abruptly than any other).

You are underestimating the Soviet engineers.

Best Soviet engineers were designing military planes, not household appliances.

You are being downvoted and yet it's still happening today.

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-raytheon-engineer-sent...

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