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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

The Soviets also had many engineers as their leaders, it was something of a fashion; didn’t seem to help much.

It worked quite well at first - I mean they had Sputnik, Gagarin etc. not bad for a country that was some backwards serfdom just half a century before.

But then they lost their ambition - a major point being when they stopped trying to develop their own computing technology and just reverse engineered IBM chips instead.

"But then they lost their ambition"

I rather say, it has to do with economic realities: there was a joke in eastern germany something like:

we got no toilet paper, but a cosmonaut, hurey.

edit:

"Keine Bretter für die Laube

Für das Auto keine Schraube

Für das Klo kein Papier

Aber Kosmonauten haben wir"

non rhyming translation:

"No wood for the hut

no screw for the car

no paper for the toilet

but a cosmonaut we got"

Weird parallel with this American Song:

"A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon) I can't pay no doctor bill. (but Whitey's on the moon) Ten years from now I'll be payin' still. (while Whitey's on the moon) The man jus' upped my rent las' night. ('cause Whitey's on the moon) No hot water, no toilets, no lights. (but Whitey's on the moon)

-- Gil Scott Heron

Probably not so surprising: those who struggle with their bare existence, are not so thrilled with money shot into space, compared to the better off.

(but Bezos on the moon)

Nah, they run out of German engineers + without futher commercialization of science there is no way forward. There is many good concepts, but almost none got out research phase.

That's because the Soviet leadership made the error to slip into the cold war confrontation, as a result, most of their science and industry was narrowly focused on developing military hardware. The Chinese had Zhou Enlai, who made the effort to avoid such a turn of events (incidentially Zhou Enlai wasn't an engineer at all).

However there were alternatives: once in office, Beria made an effort to get rid of East Germany, in an effort to end the cold war. However the rest of the polibureau ousted and executed Beria, because they feared that all this was too destabilizing (then they got the Hungarian uprising under Khrushchev, which was much worse; also Krushchev later fired his co-conspirators in the coup against Beria - Malenkov and Molotov) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria#First_Deputy_P...

I am not entirely sure about it, but the question of who is on top seems to make a big difference, when talking about a very authoritarian political system.

They also had questionable engineers and scientists a leaders, that's why horrors like Lysenkoism and the RMBK reactors became a reality.

Lysenkoism was a fully political distortion: a politician (Stalin), not the scientists community, decided (for political reasons).

The RBMK wasn't an horror, it was simply meant to exploited in a certain way, and containment was integrated. At the Chernobyl plant the guys committed a serious boo-boo (the very possibility of a disaster is common to all designs, there is no absolutely full-proof design, especially if the guys can shunt actuators/fiddle with captors/whatever).

Not really. It was a combination of factors, including the usafe operation by its staff. Disregard for safety had been a generalized problem with this reactor during all stages of its development, before the accident occured.

"According to the Soviet experts the prime cause of the accident at the Chernobyl NPP was “...an extremely improbable combination of violations of instructions and operating rules committed by the staff of the unit” [3]. This conclusion sets a full responsibility for the accident at the Chernobyl NPP on its staff. Participants of the Post-Accident Review Meeting [2] also accepted the Soviet version. However, it was incorrect. This was demonstrated in 1990 by the commission of the State Committee for Atomic Safety Survey of the USSR which concluded that the main reasons of the Chernobyl accident were serious shortcomings in the design of the Chernobyl reactor as well as inadequate documents regulating a safe operation of the reactor [4]. Various errors, that were made during the turbogenerator testing by the personnel of the fours unit of the Chernobyl NPP, according to the commission, could only contribute to the development of the accident."

  https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:1490526
  https://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr79/kr79pdf/Malko1.pdf

They were lacking a market economy, which China has largely had since the late 1980s.

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